


A Game of Mage And Reaver

by Darth Ammonite (phainopepla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Humor, Gallows Humor, Goodness There Are A Lot Of Variations On The Smut Tag, Hand Jobs, Humor, M/M, Oral Sex, Romance, Sex, Shameless Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-03 21:16:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10975500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phainopepla/pseuds/Darth%20Ammonite
Summary: Dorian Pavus is deeply, passionately in...well, maybe not love. Something. Lust, definitely. Possibly more. So is Inquisitor Lavellan. Unfortunately for them, the world seems to be conspiring to keep them apart. Between dragons, Darkspawn, Wardens, and Qunari, will Dorian wind up in the Inquisitor's bed even long enough for Orlesian politics to drag him back out of it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The state of the world is bleak right now, and sometimes the only thing left to do is play some Dragon Age, rail at the universe, and write angsty smut about Dorian. Sadly, even my attempts at angst inevitably turn to humor, and, eventually, a happy ending.

 

Inquisitor Mahonen Lavellan had red hair, pale skin, and a jawline you could slice cheese on. The left side of his face was tattooed nearly solid black, although sun and time had taken its toll and the lines had faded to deep blue.

For a Dalish elf, he was considered burly, which meant that by human standards, he looked painfully thin. This had never bothered him until he became Inquisitor. Now he would come through a village and little old ladies would rush out and insist on feeding him. If he said that no, he had to go kill red Templars, and please forgive his rudeness, they would press meat pies and homemade cookies on his companions, along with insistences that they make sure that nice Inquisitor boy was eating properly.

Varric and Dorian thought this was hilarious. They started taking bets as soon as they entered a village—“I say it’s the little gray haired one on down the way.”

“No, it’ll be the lady there with the dog that looks like a breakfast sausage.”

“It’ll be both,” said Iron Bull, “and maybe a third. I can smell the meat pies from here.”

They no longer bothered to pack food if they were going to an inhabited area. It was embarrassing, but, as Dorian pointed out, it was better than trying to cook for themselves.

_"Can_ any of you cook?” asked Lavellan one evening, gazing at the bounty of please-make-sure-the-Inquisitor-is-eating spoils.

“In my own kitchen, yeah,” said Varric. “On a rock in the middle of the Hinterlands? Why bother?”

Bull shrugged. “I can kill things, cut them up, and put them on a stick.”

“See, that’s not cooking,” said Varric.

“Sometimes I put a little sprig of parsley on the stick.”

“No. Just…no.”

They all looked at Dorian.

“What? I can set things on fire,” said Dorian. “Putting them out at the proper level of done-ness is a different sort of skill.”

“I thought Tevinter was supposed to be civilized,” said Lavellan.

“Yes,” said Dorian, “which means we _hire_ cooks. And pay them extravagantly not to poison us.”

“What about you, boss?”

Lavellan rubbed the back of his neck. “About like you, I’m afraid. Meat on a stick. I can do a few things with herbs. And roasted tubers and whatnot, if I have time. But I was a scout, and mostly you eat standing up or on the move.”

“Then thank Andraste for little old ladies,” said Varric. They all raised meat pies in salute.

 Fortunately for everyone, there were cooks at Skyhold, and no one was reduced to meat-on-a-stick, with or without parsley. Josephine had even imported a cook from Orlais who was really quite good, although Dorian described his attempts at Tevinter cuisine as “creative” and “almost, but not quite, entirely wrong.”

A meal from that most excellent cook sat half-eaten on the table next to Lavellan. He had been grabbing bites between poring over maps in his quarters.

The Inquisitor straightened up, rubbing at his back. He should not hunch over. Hunching over the maps did not improve them. The strategic situation was still dreadful and would continue to be dreadful for the foreseeable future. Throwing his back out would not help. Lavellan was a Reaver and respected pain, but not even Breaker Thram could find a good use for lower back spasms.

He was grateful when he heard someone coming up the steps to his quarters. He knew the sounds of most of his companions’ footsteps—Cole was difficult, admittedly, and Sera occasionally came in through the roof—but they had done so much construction to the stairwell that the echoes changed from one day to the next. He turned his head, just to make sure it wasn’t assassins.

It was hardly ever assassins, but there was no point in pressing his luck.

The door opened and Dorian strolled in.

Lavellan smiled. He always smiled when he saw Dorian, he couldn’t help it. Dorian was as vain as a peacock and just as gorgeous. More gorgeous, actually. Lavellan had never had any desire to make passionate love to a peacock, presumably to the relief of ornamental fowl everywhere.

Dorian, though…well.

_Down, boy._

Dorian was wearing robes, not his full armor. They were deep red, which set off his tanned skin magnificently. His left shoulder was still bare, though.

Lavellan wasn't sure why the mage always seemed to leave that arm uncovered. For ease of making magical gestures, perhaps. 

Probably not because the Inquisitor had a strong urge to kiss the bare skin, run his lips down from shoulder to elbow and plant a kiss in the palm of the mage's hand.

Almost certainly not.

Well, a man could dream.

Unfortunately dreams were all that he had at the moment. Dorian flirted as casually as breathing, and Lavellan was never sure if the flirtations meant anything.

There had been a single moment stolen in the library. The mage had slipped his hands around Lavellan’s waist and leaned his forehead against the elf’s, and their lips had met, a half-dozen kisses as light as mothwings.

For a few seconds, Lavellan had thought there was something in Dorian’s eyes, a hunger that he was sure were mirrored in his own…and then they’d broken apart, and it was right back to casual flirtation and unrequited lust.

He thought about that kiss multiple times a day. This was extremely distracting when you were trying to save the world. There was nothing quite like planting your greatsword deep in a behemoth’s skull, standing astride it, wiping a splatter of gore from your eyes, and thinking … _Does he still want me? Did he change his mind? Did he_ ever _want me?_

It occurred to Lavellan that he had been gazing at Dorian with a vague, appreciative smile for quite some time…and the mage was _posing_ in the doorway, damn him.

“Enjoying the view?”

“Always.” Lavellan raised his eyebrows. "As you well know. Can I help you?"

"Mmmm." Dorian scanned the room with the air of a man appraising the furniture. "So this is the Inquisitor's bedroom."

"In all its glory," said Lavellan dryly. He knew full well that the room was hardly luxurious, but it seemed wrong to ask for more when half the soldiers were still sleeping in the courtyard and using swords made out of pot-metal. Besides, he was used to camping outdoors.  The windswept tower very nearly qualified. If he left the balcony doors open too long, snow would come in.

“Austere.” Dorian strolled into the room. “And here I had visions of you draped in furs and velvets.”

The Dalish man laughed. “I do, in fact, have several furs, but only because it is blessedly cold up here.” He waved toward the bed. “I fear they’d disappoint you, though. It’s whatever the quartermaster could dig up. There’s a druffalo hide that’s older than I am.”

Dorian shook his head. “Appalling,” he said. “The Inquisitor should have far more exotic things in his bed.”

Lavellan was capable of recognizing a hint when it fell on his head from a great height. _Oh, hot damn._

His pulse quickened, but he kept his tone light. “Things from Tevinter, perhaps?”

“Well,” said Dorian, “one thing at least.” He circled Lavellan, looking positively predatory.

_I will not yell “Mythal’s grace, at last!” and pounce on him. That would be excessive._

_I will be calm. Tevinters hold these pleasures lightly. I will be calm._

He did not feel particularly calm.

Dorian’s hands slid around his waist and settled on his hips. He could feel the mage’s breath against his ear.

“All this flirtation is very nice,” murmured the mage, “but—“

The door banged open.

Dorian jumped back like a startled deer. Lavellan clasped his hands in front of his waist, hoping it looked casual and not like he was trying to hide a very visible arousal.

It was Cullen. He had a sheet of paper in one hand and a line between his eyes. “Inquisitor!”

_Well, this is lovely. I get to talk to my military advisor while hiding an erection. How delightful for everyone._

Dorian, who at least had concealing robes, pretended to be examining the drapes.

“It’s Blackwall,” said Cullen.

_Oh. Joy._ Lavellan could think of few things less erotic than Blackwall in general and Blackwall's beard in particular.

Dorian muttered a Tevinter obscenity under his breath.

“What’s he done now?” asked Lavellan wearily.

“Apparently nothing for quite some time,” said Cullen. “He’s dead. The real one, I mean. Our Blackwall’s an imposter. Also, he’s in prison in Val Royeaux. Also—oh, hello, Dorian.”

“Don’t mind me,” said the mage. “I was advising the Inquisitor on…ah…”

“Venatori,” said Lavellan hurriedly.

“Yes, those.”

Cullen looked from elf to mage and back again. Lavellan could see a suspicion starting to form in the former Templar’s mind.

_At least we both still have our clothes on. If he’d walked in five minutes later…_

Relief warred with intense frustration. Given how long it had been, five minutes might be more than enough time, and how sad was that?

Lavellan focused on the matter at hand. “So Blackwall is an imposter?”

“Yes,” said Cullen, picking up the thread again. “Apparently he is actually a man named Thom Rainier. And he’s due to be executed.”

“No wonder he didn’t feel the Calling,” muttered Lavellan. He rubbed his forehead. The only thing stiff about him now was his desire for a stiff drink. “Well, that’s…something I’m going to have to deal with, aren’t I?”

“He apparently turned himself in,” said Cullen. “To save the life of a man named Mornay, who had been under his command.”

Lavellan groaned. “Of _course_ he did. There was no way that it would be straightforward. Not with Blackwall. All right.”

“He left you a note,” said Cullen, and handed over the sheet of paper.

The Inquisitor read the note, balled it up, and flung it violently against the wall.

“Bad news?” asked Dorian.

“No, the bastard thanked me for being an inspiration. Mythal’s hells.” He rubbed his face. “All right. All right. Have Leliana’s people arrange for a stay of execution until I get there. We’ll leave within the hour.”

Dorian muttered an even fouler curse, even farther under his breath.

“It’s a long way to Val Royeaux,” said Lavellan, as much to himself as to Dorian. “And you know that idiot won’t say a word in his own defense. Probably ask them to move up the execution.”

“Indeed,” said Cullen. “I shall have the horses prepared at once. I will go with you.”

“Probably for the best,” said the Inquisitor. “Thank you.”

He turned to Dorian, and, hidden from Cullen’s view, rolled his eyes in frustration. “Dorian, I believe we shall have to continue this conversation at a later date.”

“Perhaps in Val Royeaux,” said Dorian.

Cullen held the door open. As the mage moved past Lavellan, his fingers trailed over the elf’s back, waking shivers in Lavellan’s spine. Then he was through the door, and mage and Templar went down the stairs together.

The Inquisitor rubbed his hands over his face. “I’m going to kill Blackwall,” he muttered to his empty room.

 

* * *

 

“No, you’re not,” said the Iron Bull several hours later.

“I am,” said Lavellan. “Dead. So dead. Deader than a…a really damn dead thing.”

They had ridden hard for half the night and stopped at a posting station, where Inquisition forces brought out fresh horses for them. (Bull, who weighed twice as much as any of the others, had a remount tied behind the saddle as well.) There was just time to grab a bite of food and attend to necessary business before climbing back in the saddle, which was why Lavellan was uttering dire threats on Blackwall's life.

“No, you won’t,” said Bull. “You’ll forgive him and say something inspirational about how he can do more good fighting Corypheus than dying here, and by the end, he’ll be begging you to take him back.”

There was a lengthy silence. Cullen rubbed the back of his neck. Dorian had his hand over his mouth to hide his smile.

“And you’ll _believe_ it too, boss,” added Bull ruthlessly. “You’ll mean every word you’re saying. That’s why it works.”

“Bull,” said Lavellan, watching the stablehands lead a string of horses toward them.

“Yes, boss?”

“You can stop knowing me too well any time now.”

“Sorry, boss.”

Lavellan gave him a skeptical look. “I’m starting to think that your fear of demons poking around in people’s heads is actually a question of job security. You just don’t want any one _else_ reading minds.”

“Might be a factor, boss.”

Varric snickered.

“It isn’t, though,” said Cole, looking puzzled. “The Iron Bull? That’s not why you’re—“

“It’s a joke, Cole,” said Lavellan.

“Oh.” The spirit frowned. “But it didn’t start with ‘knock-knock.’”

Varric patted Cole’s arm and said “I’ll explain later.”

They mounted the horses. Lavellan wished vaguely for a halla, as he always did, but a halla would not be content to cool its heels in the stable, waiting for a string of strange riders. Horses were better for this sort of work.

The stablehand holding Cole’s horse looked around in confusion. “Why did I bring a horse out here? I thought…” Varric leaned over and took the reins from him.

“She’s a nice horse,” said Cole happily. “She likes carrying people. She doesn’t think people are very bright, but if they’re on her back, she can carry them out of trouble.”

“A mare after my own heart,” said Dorian. “No one awake at this hour can be very bright.”

They spurred their steeds forward, and on to Val Royeaux.

 

* * *

 

It took another change of horses to reach the ferry across to Val Royeaux. By that time, they were all profoundly exhausted, except perhaps Cole, who didn’t really understand exhaustion, and the Iron Bull, who pretended he didn’t.

They collapsed inside the ferry cabin. It was barely big enough for all six of them, even with Cole fading into nonexistence in the corner. Cullen had two Inquisition guards stationed outside the door. Dorian draped himself over a couch and complained bitterly about the water, the waves, horses, Blackwall, and idiot Grey Wardens.

“He’s not a Grey Warden, though,” Cullen said, from the floor. “He’s an imposter.”

“He _should_ be a Grey Warden,” Dorian shot back. “He’s got the obnoxious self-sacrifice part down perfectly. Why are we even rescuing him, anyway? He’d probably enjoy being hanged.”

The Inquisitor was on the flat piece of furniture that passed for a bed, face down in the pillow. Dorian would have preferred to be stretched out next to him, perhaps letting his hip casually rest against the Dalish man’s own, perhaps stroking his fingers over the Inquisitor’s palm, where no one else could see them…

Varric, however, had claimed that side of the bed on account of riding horses being harder on dwarven anatomy, and so Dorian had taken the couch, which had the best view of the Inquisitor.

The Inquisitor in question turned his head so that he was looking at Dorian out of one bleary eye. “Because it’s the right thing to do?”

“Oh, sure, play the righteousness card.”

“And also he knows far too much about the Inquisition,” said Lavellan wearily. “And Leliana grabbed me on the way out of Skyhold. Word is that Orlais is going to try to extradite him. How much do you want Orlais to extract from our erstwhile Grey Warden?”

There was a glum silence in the cabin.

“Red knows what’s up,” rumbled Bull. “Either he comes out of that prison cell with us, or he comes out feet-first.”

Dorian sighed. Lavellan rolled his one visible eye. “Mythal, I’m tired,” he said, to no one in particular.

The tattooed side of his face was turned to Dorian. The mage could just see the spot on the elf's lips where the dark blue ink stopped. When he had kissed that spot, weeks ago, he had half-expected there to be a difference in the feel of the skin.

There hadn’t been, but he wouldn’t mind checking again, just to be sure.

The Tevinter mage considered giving Lavellan a smoldering look, but decided against it.

_At the moment, my smoldering looks will be distinctly sub-par. And there’s not much we can do about it anyway…_

And even if they had been alone, with all the time in the world...well, after spending all night on a horse, Dorian’s thigh muscles were in no shape to ride anything else. Or anyone.

_No matter how delightful I may find that face…or those hands…_

One of the Inquisitor’s hands dangled off the side of the bed. He had long fingers, scarred from blows and callused from sword work. Dorian could easily imagine those fingers moving over his body.

Had been imagining it for weeks, if he was being honest.

And in a room with Cole, even such thoughts were dangerous. Dorian turned his mind firmly to a recitation of magical theory, and fell asleep before he’d even finished listing the secondary aspects of the Fade.

* * *

 

Val Royeaux was beautiful, even for the barbaric south. The sheets were not silk, but they were soft, and the mattresses thick and yielding. The food was exquisite. There was a suite of rooms for the Inquisitor and a lovely room for each member of his entourage.

Dorian would have approved wholeheartedly, except for one small problem.

He could _not_ get time alone with the Inquisitor.

There had been a single glorious moment when he had cornered Lavellan in his bedroom and advanced on him like a stalking cat. Subtlety had fled completely.

Lavellan had looked up at him and smiled: the crooked, welcoming smile that made the mage’s blood heat. “Dorian…”

“I thought we’d never have a moment alone,” said the mage. “People always barging in and wanting thi—“

As if on cue, Cullen barged in. “Inquisitor, I—oh. Dorian?”

“So, you were saying about the Venatori,” said Lavellan, a bit desperately.

“Awful people,” said Dorian. “Not hugged enough as children.” He did not scream and freeze Cullen to the ground on the spot. Freezing Templars was apparently considered a _faux pas_ in the South. He was rather proud of his restraint.

“Noted,” said the Inquisitor. “Perhaps we could compile a list of personality traits, which might allows us to—ah—consider where to look for hidden Venatori—in—ah—the future—“

“Not a bad idea,” said Cullen gruffly. “Inquisitor, I’m stationing two guards in the room with you and I’ve asked Cole to stay here as well. We can’t vet people as closely here as we can at Skyhold, and you know what Orlesians are like.”

 “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” said Lavellan weakly.

“Let’s hope it’s not,” said Cullen. “But better safe than sorry. Dorian, is your room safe?”

“Oh yes,” said Dorian. “No one going in or out without the whole world knowing.”

Cullen was oblivious to the trace of bitterness in his voice, even if Lavellan wasn’t. They shared a heated glance behind the former templar’s back.

After about two days of this, Dorian was ready to fall to his knees and work the Inquisitor over in the Chantry confessional, if that was what it would take to get his hands on the Inquisitor’s body and his lips around the Inquisitor’s cock. _Kaffas! This is infuriating!_

He was used to such things in the Imperium, of course. Stolen kisses, subtle caresses, culminating in a forbidden dalliance. Liasons played out over weeks or months. Sometimes the waiting was half the pleasure—or more than half.

But Maker help him, it had been the better part of a year. And he could not remember ever wanting anyone half so badly in his life.

He had gone to the Inquisitor’s suite just that morning, to catch the Dalish man dressing. Cullen, thinking nothing of it, was reading him one of Leliana’s reports.

Dorian stood in the doorway, his eyes tracing the sinuous lines of tattoos down Lavellan’s torso, feeling faintly dizzy.

“Like snakes made of ink,” said Cole. “But they hurt?”

“They did hurt,” said the Inquisitor, as Cullen paused to flip pages. “It is done with needles.”

Cole looked baffled. “It’s a different hurt, though?” he said, looking from the tattoos to Dorian and back.

Lavellan looked up and saw Dorian in the doorway. “It’s different when you want it,” he said, smiling into the mage’s eyes.

Dorian rubbed his hand over his face, since the alternative was screaming and biting something. Cole looked even more baffled.

“Leliana says that they have found someone who can pass for Rainier,” said Cullen, oblivious. “Someone that, as they say, deserves the noose. But you’ll need to convince Bla—Rainier—to go along with it.”

 Lavellan sighed. “I’ll go talk to him,” he said. He shrugged into his shirt and then into the armor.

“Let me help you,” said Dorian, stepping in to thread the leather straps through their respective buckles. He had a vision of getting a chance to put his hands on the Inquisitor, but that rapidly vanished under layers of leather and chain. “Let me see…here and here and this bit goes here and…Maker! You need a valet.”

“A squire,” said Cullen. “Squires put on armor. Valets put on clothes.”

“Get him one of each, then,” said Dorian irritably. “Does this bit go on the arms or legs?”

“How do you put on _your_ armor?” asked Lavellan, amused.

“With magic, like a sensible person. There’s a cantrip to do up the clasps I can’t reach.”

“Clasps like to be closed,” observed Cole. “They don’t mind being open, but anything can be open. Being closed is what they _do.”_

“I’m glad that I’m providing them with job satisfaction, then.”

“Rainier is in the cells,” said Cullen, who was capable of extraordinary single-mindedness. “You should speak with him soon. They are already demanding extradition to Orlais.”

“Lead the way,” said Lavellan, giving Dorian an apologetic glance.

The Tevinter mage slunk back toward his room, feeling generally ill-used.

Iron Bull was reading a book in the suite’s common area. He glanced up and raised his one good eyebrow. “You look like a cat that got stroked the wrong way.”

“Is that a Ben-Hassrath opinion?” asked Dorian bitterly.

“Nope,” said Bull, turning a page. “You don’t _want_ the Ben-Hassrath opinion.”

“Don’t—no, you’re right, I probably don’t.”

“Saltpeter in your food will clear that right up, though,” said Bull, and went back to reading his book.


	2. Chapter Two

What passed between the Inquisitor and the imposter in that jail cell, neither of them ever told anyone else. But they rode out of Val Royeaux with another person in the party, his beard clipped short and a hat pulled low over his eyes.

He didn’t talk, and that was fine by Dorian. He was nursing a grudge against the not-a-Grey Warden.

It was really quite a good grudge. Dorian had dwelt lovingly on it for hours. It covered a vast range, from Blackwall’s parentage to hygiene to choice of livestock for romantic partners.

The only problem was that Blackwall was so overcome with self-loathing that he would probably have _enjoyed_ being hated by somebody else, which made the whole thing rather less satisfactory than it could have been.

_Stupid Blackwall. Stupid Wardens. Stupid Orlesian politics. Stupid…everything._

They rode into Skyhold at mid-afternoon. They had set a decent pace on the way back, but not bruising, and Dorian was feeling as if he might possibly have enough energy to have a lengthy discussion with the Inquisitor that evening on the subject of exotic things in one’s bed.

He swung down off his horse and led it into the stable, alongside the Inquisitor. Lavellan liked to stable his own horse when he could. (Dorian thought horses were nice enough animals and should be treated well by someone who knew what they were doing—i.e., by someone not Dorian.)

He leaned against one of the wooden columns and watched Lavellan with the horse. The Dalish man murmured to it in Elvish, running his hands down its legs, checking for unsound spots. Dorian was nearly certain that the horse did not appreciate that nearly as much as Dorian would have.

_I am seething with envy for a horse. I have reached a new personal low._

Lavellan stepped out of the stall and looked over at Dorian. He smiled. The oil lamp painted orange and red shadows over the dark half of his face. He looked like a masked figure in an ancient play. _Comedy, perhaps, with that smile…_ Dorian’s eyes drifted down the defined muscle of the Inquisitor’s upper arms. _Or Strength. Or Willpower._

Willpower was definitely feeling like an external force right now.

Lavellan arched an eyebrow at him. “I believe we were having a discussion before all this started…” he began.

“Venatori, wasn’t it?” said Dorian. “Yes. I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts.” _No, Desire. Definitely an allegorical representation of Desire._

The Dalish man took a step toward him. _“Well,_ then. Perhaps we should—“

“Uh, boss?” said Bull from the doorway.

Lavellan froze in mid-stride. He turned his head very slowly, looking as if he would like to yell, but wasn’t going to. “Yes, Bull?”

“Um. I just got some news from the Ben-Hassrath. Ah…it’s time-sensitive, Boss.”

“Of _course_ it is,” said the Inquisitor, with a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of his boots.

“Sorry,” said Bull. “Message is a couple days old, and urgent. Krem handed it to me as soon as I walked in. If you want to follow up on it, we’ll need to get up to the Storm Coast pronto.”

Dorian narrowly prevented himself from sliding down the pillar and putting his arms over his head.

The Inquisitor took the letter in Bull’s hand and read it. “A Qunari alliance?” he said.

“The Chargers are saddling up now, boss. I know we just got in, but…well…”

Lavellan handed the letter back. “Get me a fresh horse. We can’t afford to pass up that chance.”

“Thought you’d say that, boss.”

“The Storm Coast?” asked Dorian, of no one in particular. “Now? _Really?”_

“Hey, you don’t have to come.” Iron Bull cleared his throat. “Probably shouldn’t, actually. Vint mages and the Qun get along like wyverns in a sack, only not as fun-loving.”

“Fine! When you all get roasted to death by Venatori wizards, don’t come crying to me!”

"We'll ride out with the Chargers, then," said the Inquisitor. "Give me ten minutes to report in to Leliana."

Bull turned away. Lavellan looked quickly around the stable, reached out and seized Dorian's wrist. He gave the mage a single burning glance, pressed his lips very briefly against the mage's knuckles, then turned away.

Dorian watched the Inquisitor ride out of Skyhold, less than an hour out of riding in. He could still feel an echo of the warmth where Lavellan had kissed him. 

“Just my luck,” he said bitterly. “Cockblocked by the Qun.”

“Hey, that’s a good title,” said Varric, behind him. “I’m stealing that one if I ever start writing erotica.”

Dorian could think of absolutely nothing to say in response, and took himself grimly off to the bar instead.

 

* * *

 

 

Dorian closed the door to the Inquisitor’s chambers behind him, very softly. This time he locked it. He was taking no chances on another emergency. If Blackwall or Thom Rainier or whoever he was turned out to be impersonating the Empress Celene, he could hang for it and be damned.

He moved quietly up the steps, his stomach knotting in anticipation. Lavellan, Bull, and the Chargers had returned from the Storm Coast that afternoon. Dorian had been loitering in the hall to make sure that no one went into the Inquisitor's rooms on business, urgent or otherwise.

This time. _This time_ he would have the Inquisitor all to himself.

The memory of that glance had kept him warm for days.

He reached the bedroom, opened the door, and found that the object of his desire was already in bed.

Actually, the Inquisitor was facedown on the bed, snoring gently. He was still wearing his boots and part of his armor.

His massive greatsword had been hung on the wall, where it belonged. His breastplate was hanging sideways on the armor dummy. There were pauldrons scattered across the floor and a chainmail hauberk dangling off the side table.

There was also a strange, heavy, burnt smell that Dorian couldn’t place, and he had set a great many things on fire in his day and considered himself something of an expert on burnt smells.

The Inquisitor was still wearing the padded jerkin that went under his armor, one forearm guard, both shin guards, and a single gauntlet. Parts of his armor had black scorch marks on it, and there was a smear of ash across his cheek.

Dorian closed the door and stood, looking sadly down at the hope of the free world.

Then he heaved a great sigh and began hauling off the Inquisitor’s boots.

“Ngggh?” said Lavellan, coming awake. “Izza ‘sassin?”

“It’s Dorian.”

“Oh. Th’nk M’thal.” A long pause. “What’re y’ doing?”

“Taking off your clothes.”

“Yay…” said the Inquisitor, and then began snoring again.

He woke up again when Dorian took off his gauntlet. “Oh…Dorian? I didn’t dream that…?”

“What on _earth_ happened to you?” asked Dorian. From the front, he could see a raw red welt running through Lavellan’s short red hair.

“It was Bull. Or…not Bull. I mean…” Lavellan pushed himself up one elbow. “The dreadnought. Thing. It blew up. The Qunari are pissed. Mostly at Bull. He was sad.” He thought for a minute. “Well, I think he was sad. You know how hard it is to tell with him. He just…um…kills things with less vigor. So I said we’d go kill a dragon to cheer him up, and we were on the Storm Coast anyway…”

“You killed a _dragon?”_

“…a small one,” mumbled Lavellan, collapsing back to the blankets. Apparently the explanation had taken the last of his strength. “It tried t’eat me.”

“Maker!”

“Then Bull want to celebrate. You don’t want to know what he said to the dragon. Like, you really, really don’t want to know.” Lavellan wiggled his eyebrows. “I think he’s into dragons. _Really_ …into dragons...”

“Are you _drunk?”_

“No. M’tired. S’mostly the dragon.”

_“That’s_ the smell,” said Dorian suddenly. “You smell like dragon blood.”

“S’not blood. S’guts. Blood tastes better. Guts just stink.”

“How on _earth_ do you know what dragon blood tastes like?” Dorian unlaced the shin guards and tossed them over with the rest of the armor.

“Drank it. S’reaver thing." His brow knit. "Wait...don’t tell Thram I told you. S’posed to be a secret. I think.”

“I’m flattered you trust me. Roll over.”

The Inquisitor flopped over on his back like an injured fish. “’Course I trust you,” he said, smiling lopsidedly up at Dorian.

“Oh?” said Dorian archly.

“Oh yeah. Hopelessly in…hopeless…thing…M’thal, ‘m tired…” He began to snore again.

Dorian managed to get the Inquisitor’s jerkin free, after heroic effort and several small cantrips.

The Tevinter mage stood gazing down at the Inquisitor. He had seen the other man shirtless several times before, but had never had the opportunity to look as long as he wanted.

The Dalish man was so _thin_. He was all whipcord and wire over deceptively slender bone, skin marred with scars and long smears of ash. Dorian had traveled with him long enough to know the strength in those bones, but still...he looked so fragile lying there, without layers of chain and scale mail to lend him bulk. The blue tattoos that covered half his face trailed off into lines and swirls down his neck and shoulder, serving only to emphasize the delicate bones. One long scar ran through his eyebrow and down his cheek, almost faded to nothingness now, but marking a blow that had nearly blinded him.

Dorian reached out, traced the line of that scar over Lavellan’s cheek, and sighed.

The Inquisitor was profoundly asleep. Dorian wanted nothing more than to strip off his robes and curl up around him and listen to him breathe.

_A dragon. Maker’s mercy. I could have lost him to a damnable_ dragon _, because he was worried that the Iron Bull was_ sad.

But he did not. Old habits died too hard. You didn’t sleep beside your lovers in Tevinter. That was a good way to get caught. And you did not sleep with dreadfully attractive men who were exhausted and inebriated, even if you did nothing more than lie there, because eventually the morning would come and there would be very awkward questions, like “What are you doing in my bed?” and “Why don’t I remember what happened last night?”

He pulled a blanket up under Lavellan’s chin, kissed his forehead, and then snuffed out the candle. He padded away down the stairs with a silence that would have done Sera proud.

_And if I find Iron Bull, I am going to levitate him over the courtyard, upside down, in his underwear. And_ leave _him there._

_Dammit._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, third chapter is the charm...
> 
> Pure smut, for which I apologize not at all.
> 
> Hm, and I should probably go adjust some of those ratings...
> 
> (Also appearing on FF.net, under different penname.)

Inquisitor Lavellan walked into his quarters feeling reasonably good about life—and discovered someone was waiting for him.

He was halfway to the greatsword on the wall before he registered that it was Dorian.

“Oh, don’t let me interrupt,” said the mage, marking his place in his book. He was sitting in a chair in the corner, leg folded so his foot rested on his opposite knee. “Feel free to pull your sword on me.” He paused. “Was that too subtle a hint? Should I be more obvious?”

“I think we are _well_ past hints at this point,” said Lavellan. He locked the door, and then, to be safe, dragged a chair in front of it.

“And you are feeling well-rested? Sober? Fit?”

“I am as strong as a halla and a sober as a judge.”

“I’m afraid I have known too many judges, but I will take your word for it. And for the halla bit.” Dorian rose to his feet. “And we are not under attack? There is no army at the gate? Assassins are not dropping from the rafters? Leliana will not be sending crows to peck out my eyes?”

“We are safe from everything short of a dragon attack,” said Lavellan. “Or Corypheus, I suppose.”

“Don’t joke about that,” said Dorian. “I will have you tonight or I will go as mad as he has. Possibly madder.” He slid his arms around Lavellan’s waist. “I am very serious, Inquisitor. If we are interrupted one more time, I may very well burn this tower down. The Templars will be _extremely_ upset.”

“Mythal protect us,” said the Inquisitor. “I suppose I have no choice but save the Inquisition from such a fate—“ and the mage covered his mouth with his own.

It started where their earlier kiss in the library had left off and carried it a long way further. Dorian’s hips moved against his and one hand slid up the back of his neck and clenched in the Dalish man’s hair.

They broke apart, gasping for air. “Yes?” whispered the mage.

“Oh yes.”

_“Good.”_

Dorian steered him toward the bed. Lavellan was happy to allow himself to be steered. It gave him a chance to push the mage's robes off his shoulders, and to finally kiss the bare skin there that he had been eyeing for so long. 

The other man's skin was warm and smooth. Lavellan closed his eyes, drowning in the sensation against his lips. He was kissing Dorian, not a quick, stolen kiss in the corner of the library, but long and lingering, and it seemed there was more to come.

"Oh Mythal," he groaned against the mage’s shoulder, "let there not be a dragon attack!"

"We'll tell Corypheus to come back later, shall we?"

“You laugh. I might.”

“He seems like an understanding sort.” Dorian’s fingers were at work now, stroking him through the front of his breeches. “Well, well. It seems that I have the Inquisitor’s attention.”

“My undivided attention,” said Lavellan. “Although—" he swallowed hard “—I must warn you that it’s been quite some time…”

“I trust you haven’t forgotten how anything works,” said Dorian, sliding his hand up the elf’s hip and then down, inside his waistband. His fingers closed over Lavellan’s cock.

“ _Ah!”_ Lavellan had to catch the mage’s wrist and pull it away or risk coming right then, like a fumbling teenager. “I haven’t,” he gasped, “but Dorian, I’ve wanted this—and you—for so long—"

“I wanted to fuck you within three hours of meeting you,” said Dorian cheerfully. “But we were in the future and everything was hellish and it seemed like that would be in poor taste.”

Lavellan grinned. He pressed his lips against the delicate spot where neck joined shoulder, and let the mage feel just the edge of his teeth. Dorian shivered.

“I would have taken you up against a wall, right there in Redcliffe,” he murmured. Dorian shivered harder.

“A lost opportunity,” the mage said, when he could get his breath back. “Particularly since that future would then would never have really happened at all, and what a waste _that_ would be.”

He pushed Lavellan back onto the bed. Lavellan could have resisted quite easily, but he had no desire to do so. He sank back onto his elbows and watched Dorian kneel between his legs.

“Now, how in blazes do I get these pants off you…?” muttered the mage. There was a complicated set of thongs tying them together down the sides and binding together in front, which Lavellan had tied in a Dalish knot.

“You have to untie the left side from the right and then…”

_Fwoosh._

“…and you’ve just incinerated my pants, haven’t you?”

“Not the whole thing!” said Dorian defensively, peeling the fabric away. “Just the ties. They were an ugly color anyway.”

The leather thongs held their shape for an instant, then collapsed into ash. Lavellan started laughing, and laughed even harder as Dorian tried futilely to wipe it away, leaving charcoal colored streaks across the sheets. “How on earth am I going to explain this to the servants?”

“Tell them it’s left over from the dragon.”

“I suppose that might—“

And then Dorian’s hands were on him, sliding up and down his length, and Lavellan reared up off the bed, gasping. "Ah! _Mythal!"_

The mage’s smile was wicked, but he did pause. “Hmmm?”

Lavellan laughed, almost painfully. It was embarrassing, but there was no getting around the truth. It had been so long since he’d felt anyone’s touch but his own. "I'm— _ah!_ —not going to last—very long—"

"So don't," said the mage, resting his cheek against the inquisitor's thigh. "The night is young. We will take the edge off."

"I had hoped to make a—ah!—better first impression..."

"Better than following me through a tear in the fabric of time? Someone has a high opinion of himself."

"Yes, but that was a little dif— _ahh!"_

Dorian's mouth was on him now, hot and tender, and Lavellan could not seem to catch his breath. He had to close his eyes, or the sight of Dorian working on him would end him right there. His fingers dug into the sheets. "Mythal— _ma vhenan_ —"

The mage lifted his head, undoubtedly preparing some clever comment, and the shock of cool air against Laevallen's skin pushed him helplessly over the edge. " _Dorian_ — _!"_

 

* * *

 

"Probably as well that I dodged that one," said Dorian, amused. "You might have taken my head off entirely." He rose to his feet and went to the basin. A flick of magic and the cold water began to steam.

 _"Ara seranna-ma,_ " said Lavellan, as Dorian washed his hands. The mage could hear the chagrin in the other man's voice. "I'm not usually...oh, Mythal, I even sound like a cliche."

Dorian laughed. "I have seen you run through a burning city, pulling people from the flames," he said, "then fight an army singlehanded. Your stamina is not in doubt." He wrung out a cloth in the hot water and brought it back to the bed.

The elf gasped as the cloth touched too-tender skin, then slowly he stilled under Dorian's ministrations. "Give me a moment," he said, eyes half-closed, "and I'll return the favor..."

"I'm in no hurry." Dorian tossed the cloth aside and stretched out beside him. It was true. He wanted to lie there for as long as he could. All night, even.

Tomorrow there would be some dreadful peril and they would probably all be eaten and shat out by dragons.

Tonight, he had other plans.

Also, he was feeling ungodly smug.

The Inquisitor was always calm. Preternaturally calm. When he had pulled those people from the flames of Haven, his face had been set in an expression of grim concentration, nothing more.

He could look at a dragon and say “Well, this should be interesting.” He had stared into the face of a bleak future and he had listened to Dorian throwing out wild explanations by the handful, and at the end, he had nodded and said “Tell me what you need me to do.”

Presumably that was the reason he was the Inquisitor. He never panicked. He was cool water, in contrast to Dorian’s fire and flippancy. Even when death was nearly certain (and it was always nearly certain) he turned to humor as dry and dark as dust instead.

To hear him gasping and crying out Dorian’s name…well. _That_ was something to feel smug about.

He wanted to hear it again. He wanted to hear it in his ear, with the Inquisitor inside him or around him.

Either. Both.

_Slow down. All in good time. You barely know what he likes yet…_

"Enjoying the view?" asked Lavellan dryly. Dorian realized he’d been gazing at the elf’s body with a vague, silly smile. "I'm not so pretty as you are, I admit."

"And a good thing, too," said Dorian. "I'd become dreadfully insecure."

The elf laughed. Dorian felt smug about _that,_ too.

The view was not bad, admittedly. Pale skin and hard muscle, tattoos faded to dark blue over time. Dark red hair, very fine, both above and below. 

Pretty, no. Not even handsome, as Dorian understood the word. Too thin, too scarred, too angular. No one would mistake him for handsome, or for human.

But beautiful, as a thing much desired is always beautiful. Yes.

The mage had a sudden mad urge to protect Lavellan, and that was obviously ridiculous. He'd seen the Inquisitor swing a greatsword as if it weighed nothing at all, seen him laughing through a mask of blood, seen him face down an ancient Darkspawn and survive. How was he supposed to protect someone like that?

_If I truly wanted to protect him, I would walk away, and save him from the rumors of Tevinter influence._

He had tried. He truly had. But the Inquisitor was glorious in his unconcern, and Dorian was not made of stone.

He reached out, running a finger over the other man's hip, down the lean muscle of his thigh, stroking over the narrow line of hair along his belly. He had always found such touches useful for relaxing a lover, while leaving the promise of more to come.

After a few moments, though, he realized that Lavellan was _not_ relaxing. Quite the opposite. His muscles were drawn taut and when Dorian trailed a hand over his stomach, he felt quivering.

He looked up, searchingly, into Lavellan's face. The Dalish man's eyes were tightly closed, his lips parted, as if he was concentrating on Dorian's touch with every fiber of his being.

"Are you all right?"

"What?" The elf's eyes flicked open. They were gray, oddly colorless, like deep, clear water. Dorian was still deciding if a man would be unwise to drown in them. "Yes?"

Dorian took the elf's angular face in his hands. "If you don't like anything I'm doing, you need only say so. I won't feel slighted."

Lavellan smiled crookedly. "Oh, I do like it," he said. "Very much."

The mage kissed him, and somewhere in that kiss, in the heat and the fierceness and the way Lavellan's hands closed convulsively on his shoulders, he found the answer.

"How long _has_ it been?"

"...uh. Heh. Since before the Conclave." Lavellan lifted his hand and raked it through his short red hair. "Long before, if you must know." Dorian could actually see the flush spreading across the Inquisitor's cheeks, going up toward his hairline and down past his collarbone. It broke into patches across his chest. The mage watched it, mildly fascinated, until it faded.

"That long?"

"Well, the world was ending. I was busy."

"Mmmm." Dorian slid his palm down Lavellan's shoulder and the other man froze as if spellbound.

He saw it all at once. The Inquisitor always standing alone, in a small, clear space. No one brushed up against him, embraced him or slapped him on the back. _Well...Bull, maybe. No one else. Too much awe. Too much decorum. The people who lay hands on him are trying to get their sword in his guts or their fingers around his throat._

_And when he touches people, he is usually hauling them out of burning buildings or helping drag the wounded to safety. And he wears gauntlets anyway._

_You'd think the healers—but no. The finest potions and magical healing for the Inquisitor, nothing so sloppy as stitches or bandages. No valet or bodyservants, not here in the barbaric South._

_How long has it been since someone touched him_ kindly _? Even just a friend putting a hand on his arm?_

No one. No one but a single mad Tevinter mage, who had been trying _not_ to touch him, so that no one would think he was seducing the Inquisitor into ruin.

The way Lavellan had responded to him hadn't been the reaction of an ascetic giving in, but of a man half-starved for touch.

He'd missed it, all this time, because of the clever tongue and the smirk and the weary humor. The man was a _Reaver_ , for Andraste's sake!

The Inquisitor tilted his head. "You're angry," he said.

Yes, Dorian realized. He was angry. Angry and heartsick that his friend—yes, a _friend_ , a good one, not just someone worth fucking, _fine_ , he'd admit that much—had been so alone, for so long. Furious with himself for not noticing.

Furious at everyone _else_ for not noticing, for that matter.

_Maker! Couldn't Josephine have arranged someone...anyone...a discreet courtesan, a spy with skilled hands, someone to take the edge off?_

He had to stand up. He didn't mean to push the other man away, but he had to move. He had always been restless and more so when he was angry. He went to the balcony door and then stopped. Being seen half-naked in the Inquisitor's quarter might not be the wisest thing to do, and also it was freezing.

"I can hardly blame you," said the elf behind him. "Not what you must have imagined, eh? The great hope of Thedas, lasting less than two minutes. But—"

" _No!"_ said Dorian, turning. "No, not at you! I'm just can't believe that no one—not one person out of the thousands you've saved, was even willing to—to offer you a quick hand job out of gratitude!”

The Inquisitor propped himself up on one elbow. "I don't want gratitude,” he said. "And not so many people here are fond of elves. At least, not in ways I would be willing to endure."

The silence stretched out almost intolerably. Dorian put a hand to his mouth, rage giving way to sudden horror. He had forgotten. 

Maker forgive him, he had _forgotten._

He had a sudden horrible sense that he was on the brink of saying absolutely the wrong thing, and if he said the wrong thing, it would be unforgivably wrong and then everything would be broken past mending.

"It hasn't been so bad," said Lavellan, almost kindly. "I do kill a great many people, you know. It's, um, not the same at all, but it does work out one's frustrations."

"We use you abominably," said Dorian, trying for lightness and not entirely sure if he was succeeding. "Surely with all her connections, Josephine could have managed something."

The Dalish snorted. "To have me serviced like a prize halla, you mean?"

"Anything to keep you in fighting form, my dear Inquisitor."

"Do tell me when you plan to suggest it to her. I'd like to watch."

 _"Fortunately,_ that will no longer be necessary." Dorian folded his arms. Were they back from the brink? Had he managed not to say anything too asinine? "It seems that I arrived not a moment too soon."

"Oh?" Lavellan cocked his eyebrow. "Will you be servicing the prize halla, then?"

"Not until the halla has returned the favor." He closed the drapes. "Kaffas! It's freezing up here." He turned back, unbuckling his belt.

The Inquisitor laughed. Dorian heard a note of relief. Perhaps they had stepped back from the edge together. "I hope you're not expecting me to incinerate _your_  breeches."

"Perish the thought! These are far too expensive. Also, you're not a mage." He paused, hands still on his waistband. "As a Reaver, I suppose you could tear them to shreds, but only if they'd done you a serious injury first..."

Lavellan reached for him with a growl of amusement. "You'd better take them off for me, then."

"Well, if you _insist_..."

It ended, as one might expect, with the bedcurtains drawn so that they did not freeze to death. Lavellan straddled his legs, looking down at him, his eyes dark and thoughtful.

Dorian desperately wanted to ask what the Inquisitor was thinking, but did not.

_That would be the worse sort of cliché. Have a little faith. You’re in his bed at last. He’s probably not thinking of throwing you out._

“Mmm.” Lavellan reached over to the bedside table and unstoppered a jar.

“The Inquisitor keeps oil on his nightstand? How shocking!”

Lavellan snorted. “The Inquisitor lives at the top of a tower in a mountain pass, and his skin gets very dry. But what a filthy mind you have…”

“I’ve been told it’s one of my best qualities.”

Dorian had no idea what to expect. He had had any number of lovers, but he had never known anyone like the Inquisitor.

_How does a man who kills dragons make love?_

Slowly, it turned out. Tenderly. Lavellan’s scarred hands moved over his skin, pausing often, as if determined to learn every inch of his body. The elf worked his way up from Dorian’s hips, inch by inch, tracing each muscle, and sweeping his thumbs at last over Dorian’s cheekbones.

The mage looked up into those deepwater eyes and then Lavellan murmured something in Elvish, too faint to hear, and kissed him.

It was slow and sweet and deep. Lavellan’s mouth opened over his and Dorian stopped thinking for a little while.

When he surfaced at last, gasping for breath, some tiny part of his mind was weak enough to wonder if he was in the Fade after all and a desire demon had taken him.

_If it has, I give myself up freely…_

No, this was reality. Only in reality would there be a fold of blanket digging uncomfortably into his shoulder. Only in reality would it still be so cold (although the Inquisitor radiated heat like a furnace.) Only in reality would the oiled hands that settled on his cock have sword calluses on the palms…

_Oh my._

He stopped worrying about the blanket under his shoulder.

Slowly, Lavellan began to stroke him. Up the length of his shaft, thumb moving over the sensitive ridge there, and then over, palm rubbing across the head of his cock, and back down again. And then again, with the other hand, one after the other: up, across, down, up, across, down—anticipation, a blaze of sensation, and then a moment to gasp and catch his breath.

Some tiny, analytical part of Dorian paused to admire the technique. The vast majority of Dorian was panting and rubbing himself against the Inquisitor like a bitch in heat.

Trying to, anyway.

Lavellan’s hands were moving faster now. Dorian’s hips bucked futilely, trying to match the rhythm, but instead of the in-and-out, heartbeat rhythm of sex, this was something else, familiar but alien, a three-beat cadence—up, across, down—he couldn’t drive himself into Lavellan’s hands in a way that fit the pattern, and he was whimpering now, half-mad with anticipation and frustration…

He looked up into Lavellan’s face and saw that he was calm, as he was always calm, but with a faint smile.

 _He’s enjoying this, the bastard,_ thought Dorian, and then an instant later, _Of course he is, don’t you want him to?_

“Relax,” murmured Lavellan, his fingers never breaking rhythm. “Relax, _ma vhenan._ Breathe. _”_

He tried. His muscles were quivering with strain, but he held himself still, drowning in the sensation, in those deep, clear eyes, trying to breathe…

Breathing. It was a breath rhythm, in and held and out again. He had only to lie back and breathe, his fingers clenching in the sheets, over and over…

“Good, _ma vhenan,_ good _…ma na sumeil…ara ma’athlan vhenas…”_

He had no idea what those words meant, but it didn’t matter. The tenderness in the other man’s voice undid him. He heard himself crying out the Inquisitor’s name and came at last, into his cupped hands.

 

* * *

 

It was Lavellan’s turn to get up and wash his hands. He brought back a cloth too, though it had cooled, but Dorian didn’t mind.

He lay in the Inquisitor’s bed, feeling drained and sated. For the first time since leaving Tevinter, he felt entirely at peace, and also more exhausted than if he had fought an army of demons.

_I must remember that gentleness does not mean weakness…_

Lavellan kissed his forehead, rose, and came back again, this time with a cup of water.

“I adore you,” said Dorian. “Have I told you that?”

“Only just now.” He took the cup when Dorian had finished, drank it dry, and set it down. Then he climbed into bed beside the mage, stretched out alongside him, one arm across his chest.

“I should tell you every day. I should have been telling you since Redcliffe.” Dorian groaned. “What a dreadful amount of time wasted. I could kill Blackwall.”

Lavellan chuckled. “We’ll make up for lost time, then.”

The mage sighed. “Until we’re all killed horribly, I suppose.”

The Inquisitor took his hand and kissed each knuckle separately. “Then I shall die knowing you adore me. Which is a vast improvement over yesterday.”

“Lavellan…” Dorian began.

“Mahonen.”

Dorian tilted his head. “Sorry?”

“My name,” said Lavellan. “Mahonen. Lavellan is my clan name. Like Pavus is for you.”

The mage blinked at him. “You mean for six months now, I’ve been calling you by your last name?”

 “It’s fine. I’m the only Lavellan here. It’s not a secret, it just never seemed important before, but…” He shrugged, then flashed his crooked smile. “But if you are going to cry out my name in the night, better mine than my entire clan.”

“Mahonen,” said Dorian, rolling the name around on his tongue. “Well. I will cry it out every night, given the chance.”

“Good,” murmured the Dalish man in his ear. “Good.”

They lay together in companionable silence, half-dozing, until at last Dorian sighed.

“I should get up,” he said sadly. “Or I will fall asleep right here.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“Not for me,” said Dorian. He listened to the slow sound of Mahonen Lavellan breathing and thought that he could lie there with his ear against the other man’s chest for hours and be content. “But…”

He sat up. Lavellan looked at him out of sleepy, half-lidded eyes. “Mmm?”

“What would Mother Giselle say?”

“I don’t care in the least what she says. The Chantry has already made me the herald of one of their human gods. If they begin poking about in my bedroom…”

Dorian sighed. The Inquisitor was beautiful, calm, nearly indestructible. He could face down a dragon and walk out of the Fade alive and he had no more notion of political expediency than a nug.

“I adore you utterly,” said the mage, rather than try to explain. “I will adore you until the stars fall from the sky and the magisters renounce blood magic and take up knitting.” He kissed Lavellan’s forehead and smiled down into his eyes. “And I will see you in the morning, Mahonen.”

“As you wish,” said the Inquistor, smiling. His eyes drifted closed.

Dorian removed the chair in front of the door and quietly let himself out.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bull should just hang out a shingle that says "The Iron Bull: Official Therapist To The Inquisition"

They had three days in Skyhold that time, and three glorious nights, before the world started demanding saving from yet another ailment.

Dorian was feeling smug again. The Inquisitor had come in from his last meeting tense and unhappy. Dorian had first tried to charm him out of his mood, and then, when charm failed, had outright seduced him out of it.

The Dalish man, even in a mood, had been very careful of his partner…at least at first.

“You won’t break me, you know,” said Dorian, amused. “This may astonish you, but I am not a blushing virgin.”

“Shocking,” said Mahonen into the back of his neck, but he had begun to move faster, driving more deeply, until Dorian was throwing his head back and gasping aloud.

The vast majority of the words that Mahonen had cried in his ear had been in Elvish, but Dorian recognized his name.

Afterward, curled together in a wreckage of sheets, only one thing marred Dorian’s contentment.

_“Must_ we go to Crestwood? I hate Crestwood. It stinks of undead and misery.”

“Should be fewer undead now,” said Lavellan. “And the parts farther east are lovely. We’ll do a little outreach, fly some banners, kill off people’s problems, and sleep under the stars.”

Dorian grumbled. “You say that as if I should appreciate it.”

“Don’t you?”

“Stars are cold. And I prefer mattresses to rocks,” said Dorian. Lavellan was stroking his back from hip to spine, and the mage stretched luxuriously under the touch.

“Perhaps we can find you something a trifle more comfortable to sleep on,” said the Inquisitor. “Or _with,_ anyway.”

“Mmmpf.” The Inquisitor had not pressed the issue of him staying the night, beyond letting him know that he would be welcome.

_Would it matter, out in the wilds? Would anyone know or care?_

Their companions would certainly know. Some of them would _definitely_ care. He could imagine what Cassandra would say, or Solas. And going out alone, mage and reaver, would raise a great many eyebrows.

Mother Giselle was trying her best. Dorian knew that, much as it pained him to admit it. He had heard whispers as he passed and had heard the Chantry mother speak up behind him. “He follows the Herald, as do we. See, even a Tevinter knows that our cause is just, and goes into exile to follow…”

Which was true, so far as it went, and conveniently left out that the Tevinter in question was warming the Inquisitor’s bed. And since no one could prove that, and since Dorian tried not to touch Lavellan in public, even if his fingers itched to do so, they had achieved a certain cautious equilibrium.

He didn’t think that equilibrium would survive being seen rolling out of the Inquisitor’s quarters in the morning with his hair tousled, smelling of sex.

He sighed and rolled over to face the elf. “It seems like a waste. The world is marching toward certain doom, and we’re chasing around Crestwood rescuing people’s lost cats.”

“Mythal, tell me about it!” Lavellan rubbed his hand over his face. “But I am informed that we can’t possibly do anything to avert disaster without the help of the Orlesians, and the Orlesians aren’t willing to admit we exist yet. So now we rescue kittens from trees and smile a great deal to make people love us, while Josephine puts the screws to nobles behind the scenes.”

“And you’re bringing Bull?”

“People notice when he smiles. Also, he can reach the low-hanging kittens.”

Dorian snickered. “A dwarf, a Qunari, an elf and a Tevinter mage…”

“And Cole.”

“…and a…whatever Cole is. Yes, I imagine we’ll be _very_ lovable.”

Lavellan made a maybe-yes, maybe-no tilting gesture of his hand. “Cole to watch their heads. And Varric knows every merchant from here to Kirkwall, and if he doesn’t know them, he knows their language. He’ll be able to tell them all about the trade advantages of working with the Inquisition, get word on who would benefit from having some armed escort...”

“And I suppose you have some use for me, other than the not-inconsiderable pleasure of my company?”

Lavellan smiled. “Other than that, yes. You’re a mage. You’re better with people than Solas—“

“A rock is better with people than Solas. An _angry_ rock.”

“—and I’m hoping you’ll charm some mages out of hiding for us. They’ll see you wandering about without a Templar breathing down your neck, and think that perhaps the Inquisition is a safe haven for a mage who might have fled the fighting.”

Dorian considered. “Not a bad idea. Mind you, you may get some rogue Templars who feel that I need to have a leash slipped on me for my own good.”

Lavellan, lying on his back, folded his hands neatly over his chest. “Then I will kill them,” he said.

There was neither threat nor remorse in his voice. It was not so much casual as unremarkable. The sky was blue, the snow was cold, Lavellan killed Templars who threatened Dorian, water continued to be wet.

Dorian winced. “I’d rather people not die over me,” he said.

The Inquisitor opened one eye. “You have people who will kill for you,” he pointed out. “The next frightened hedge wizard may not.”

“Mmm.” Dorian knew this was true, but he didn’t have to like it.

The Inquisitor turned his head, showing the half-mask of ink. Dorian reached out and traced the swirls of unmarked skin through the dark field of the Dalish man’s cheek.

“No one will ever put a leash on you,” said Lavellan quietly. There was nothing casual about his voice now. “Not while I am alive to stop them.”

Dorian opened his mouth to say something, and then saw the look in Lavellan’s colorless eyes.

His fingers, at the same time, reached the back of the Dalish man’s jaw, and the long sweep of his left ear.

It occurred to him suddenly that Lavellan might know more than a little about leashes.

The alienages—the atrocities that many humans spoke of almost casually, because they were happening to the knife-ears and not to _real_ people—

Visions crowded his head, too horrible to contemplate, and he shoved them away before any could come into focus.

He kept his voice light as he slid his fingers into Lavellan’s hair. That was his gift, to take nothing seriously until he had to. “And you will be charming elves out of hiding, I take it? Showing them that there is safety in the Inquisition?”

Lavellan snorted. “Safety, no. Dignity, perhaps.”

“You are capable of great dignity,” said Dorian honestly. And then, wickedly, “At least when you aren’t squirming…” and began to tickle him mercilessly along the ribs.

The Inquisitor, Herald of Andraste, hope of Thedas, etc etc, was dreadfully ticklish and let out a squawk. Their wrestling match ended, as Dorian knew it would, with the slender Reaver pinning him to the bed.

“Wretch,” murmured Mahonen, and leaned forward to kiss him deeply.

“ _Amatus,”_ said Dorian, but he said it silently against Mahonen’s lips, so that the other man wouldn’t hear him.

* * *

 

Their progress across Thedas might count as bar-hopping, but not the fun kind.

They rode into a village and little old ladies pressed meat pies on them. Varric would find the merchants and the rest of them would find the inn. People inside sat up and said “Inquisition” to one another, and “Herald” and “Skyhold.”

They talked to the innkeeper for five or ten minutes, finding out who needed cats rescued (or more often, bandits routed and rogue Templars killed.) They would buy completely unneeded provisions, and Bull and the Inquisitor would have a drink of whatever the specialty of the house was and pay in Inquisition coin. Then they would ride out again, pick up Varric, accept more meat pies, and head to the next town.

“I realize this sounds weird, boss, but I can’t take many more of these house drinks,” said Bull, after the seventh or eighth round of this. “It’s not the booze, it’s all the froofy shit. I nearly swallowed a little paper umbrella.”

“We’ll reach Crestwood soon,” said the Inquisitor. “I’m with you, though. I thought these little villages were…you know…salt of the earth. I didn’t realize I’d get so many fruit brandies.”

“They’re getting out their best for you,” said Varric. “Which is good, from a diplomatic standpoint, but in this region? It’s going to be berry cordials and fruit brandy. Just keep smiling.”

“If I drink many more cordials, I’m going to vibrate clear off this horse.”

“That one place had a drink with a pear in it,” said Bull. “A whole pear. They grow them inside the bottles and then pour the brandy in. That was classy.”

“In Antiva, you can get that with durian,” said Dorian.

“I thought durian were huge.”

“It’s a very big bottle.”

They paused outside the next village. Bull pounded on his sternum, belched, and said “Okay, but this is the last one, boss. Then I need…like…raw meat or something. Settle my digestion.”

“Last one,” promised the Inquisitor, and braced himself for an onslaught of meat-pies.

The tavern was like any of a dozen others. The sign that swung over the door was indistinct.

“Is that a pig or a bear?” whispered Dorian.

“Dunno,” whispered Varric back. 

“Seems like an important distinction.”

“Art is hard.” The dwarf spotted a table covered in jewelry and made his way across the street. Cole wandered off somewhere. The rest of them filed into the tavern.

Dorian didn't hear the initial comment, just the answer. "...and his little Vint whore."

He ignored it. It was not the worst he'd been called by a long shot. Truth be told, he hardly even registered the insult at first--not until Lavellan moved.

The Inquisitor spun, eyes sweeping the crowd. His face was calm but there was a mask-like quality to it, and his eyes had blood in them.

He got three feet and Iron Bull blocked him like a wall.

"Out of my way," said Lavellan.

Bull rumbled something too low for Dorian to hear.

"That's an order."

Dorian pushed forward in time to hear "Then I'm disobeying it. Boss."

"I'll feed him his tongue," said Lavellan, very softly.

"And that will do him and you and the Inquisition no good at all."

Dorian was at the Inquisitor's side now, and heard the Qunari say, in an undertone, _"Said the oxman to the knife-ear."_

Lavellan’s head snapped back as if he’d been struck.

"You think he hasn't heard it before, same as us, boss?"

“I…”

Dorian grabbed the Inquistor's shoulder. "If you are going to duel someone over my virtue, please have it be someone attractive," he said acidly. "Otherwise it is simply _tawdry."_

The Inquisitor looked from one to the other, gave a single curt nod, and stalked to the bar _._

Dorian let out a long breath, looking after him.

"I suppose he hadn't heard it before," he muttered.

"He'll hear it a lot more before we’re through," said Bull. 

They left the inn only a few minutes after they arrived. Varric looked over, got a short, meaningful head-jerk from Bull, and mounted up. The Inquisitor said “Southeast. Rogue Templars on the other side of the keep,” and swung up onto his horse. He did not look at the others, only waited until they had mounted, then kicked his horse forward.

“There’s a tangle,” said Cole mournfully, looking at the Inquisitor’s distant back.

“I bet there is,” muttered Bull.

“ _Knife-ear._ _Rabbit._ He doesn’t care if they call him that. It can’t hurt him.” Cole gnawed on his lower lip. “And the others. The clan. The words can’t hurt any of them. They are better than the words.”

Varric let out a sigh that came from his toes.

Dorican felt suddenly, deeply ashamed of humans everywhere. He was also sure that if he tried to apologize for his kind, it would make everything worse. He stared at his hands on the reins.

Cole looked at Dorian, apparently puzzled. “He’s embarrassed now. He should have realized you were better than the words too. But heartbeat in ears. Red taste. How dare they! So angry still. I don’t understand!” He grabbed the edges of his hat in both hands.

“It’s very complicated, kid,” said Varric wearily. “Just…complicated.”

“I could try to—“

_“No,”_ said Bull, in a voice that brooked no argument. “Leave it.”

They slept that night at the keep in Crestwood that had been held by bandits. There were actual beds and everyone scrambled to prepare a suitable welcome for the Inquisitor.

The Inquisitor, Dorian knew, would have preferred stew and a spot by the fire, then an early bed, but he was painfully gracious. He praised the work done on the keep, listened solemnly to the people who came up asking for aid, promised to bring this and that matter to the attention of the proper people.

Dorian sat and watched and felt dull and tired and… _old._

The Inquisitor was calm. He was always so damn calm. And Dorian could have believed that he had imagined that flash of rage, or that it had passed, except for Cole saying _So angry still._

It was painful because Dorian wanted to grab him and yell “Don’t be mad on my behalf! It doesn’t matter what they say!” And you couldn’t grab someone and yell that when they were listening, with apparent deep concern, to a farmer who was afraid that his herbalist friend had gone missing, although no, it wasn’t like she was _late_ , it was just…well, he worried…

In the end, the Inquisitor was the last to seek his bed. Dorian would have stayed up but Bull clapped him on the shoulder and said, with false heartiness, “Dawn comes early!” and then he had no choice but to follow.

There were three rooms—or rather, two rooms and the Inquisitor’s. Varric and Cole took one, Dorian and Bull took the other. The Inquisitor slept alone.

Dorian lay in the dark with his teeth gritted, tossing and turning.

He punched the pillow.

He rolled over.

He adjusted his blankets.

He kicked them off.

He rolled over the other way.

“Just rub one out, will you?” groused Bull from across the room. “That’s what I do when I can’t sleep.”

Dorian groaned and flopped across the bed, arms dangling. “I can’t stop thinking,” he said.

“About him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

That side of the room went quiet for a bit, and then Bull let out a long-suffering sigh. “All right. Talk.”

“He was so angry,” said Dorian.

“He was,” acknowledged Bull.

“You stopped him. Thank you.”

Bull snorted. “He _let_ me stop him. I figured the shock would do it, honestly. If we’d got in an actual fight…eh. I’m older and sneakier, but he could just drop a damn rift on my head and suck me into the abyss ass-first, so I’m not looking to test it.”

“But he stopped.”

“He did.” Bull paused, measuring his words. “He didn’t like what they said to you.”

Dorian stared at the dim ceiling. “And I was so embarrassed, but then Cole said they called him—they called him that—“

He couldn’t choke out the word.

“I know,” said Bull patiently.

They both stopped. The stairs creaked outside the room. The door at the end of the hall opened and shut.

The Inquisitor was going to bed at last.

They both listened to the sound of boots hitting the floor and the bed creaking as Lavellan lay down in it.

When Dorian spoke again, it was quietly, pitched for Bull’s ears only.

“As soon as Cole said it, I wanted to kill whoever had said that to him.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Which would probably embarrass him. And then I knew how he must have felt—except that it wasn’t elves calling me a whore!”

“Do you care?” asked Bull. “If they call you that?”

“No!” said Dorian. “No, of course not! It isn’t true, and even if it was—“

His teeth clicked together over the words _I’d be_ his _whore_ , because that was not something he was willing to even _think_ , let alone say aloud.

“It will keep happening,” said Bull in a subterranean rumble. “Whether or not you’re hopping in and out of his bed at night.”

Dorian blinked.

“How did you know?”

Bull snorted, sounding not unlike his namesake.

“The way you held yourself around him,” he said, sounding suddenly pleasant and precise, in a way that no longer startled Dorian. It was the switch from his big-dumb-Qunari act to trained Ben-Hassrath agent. “You went from being afraid _he’d_ notice how close you were standing to being afraid that everyone _else_ would notice how close you were standing.” He considered for a moment. “Also, you were both wandering around with that kind of pleased smirk people get after screwing their brains out, so it wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”

“Fine,” said Dorian wearily. “But no one _else_ knows that, do they?”

Bull considered. “Josephine and Red sure do. Varric, probably. Cole…well, who knows what Cole knows? But they see you, looking absurdly pretty, and they see him, looking like the conquering hero, and they assume…”

He chuckled softly. “Of course, that’s probably better than the alternative. As long as you’re there, making big doe-eyes at our conquering hero, no one assumes _I’m_ tapping Inquisitor ass.”

“I do _not_ make doe-eyes.”

_“Please._ Your eyes follow him around the room like one of those creepy paintings.”

Dorian was silent for several minutes. Then: “I’m going to go talk to him.”

“You’re going to go ride him like a pony,” said Bull dryly. “But it’ll be good for both of you, so just try to keep the screaming to a minimum.”

He rolled over and began to snore before Dorian had even left the room.

 

* * *

 

Dorian slipped into the Inquisitor’s room and shut the door softly behind him. The only light came in through an arrow slit in the wall.

The Inquisitor said nothing, but he could see the reflection of moonlight in the Dalish man’s eyes. He padded toward the bed.

Lavellan quietly moved over and lifted the blanket to give him room.

Dorian slid into bed. The blankets were rough flannel, the mattress thin, but the Inquisitor’s skin was warm.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Dorian into his neck.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, _ma vhenan_. I should apologize to you.”

“No.”

“Yes,” said Mahonen. He lifted Dorian’s face and held it between his scarred palms. “Listen. From when I was young and went among humans, they called me a knife-ear. And if it did not hurt me, then it made me better than them. They had thrown the worst insult they could, and it meant nothing.”

Dorian thought of a young red-haired elf, stick-thin, hearing words hurled at his back. His stomach roiled. He wanted to find that young man that Mahonen had been and hug him and protect him from harm.

“And my clan was the same. If they insulted us, and we did not feel it, then it was as if we were immune to arrows.” He swallowed, searching Dorian’s face. “But today that man insulted you. And I wanted to destroy him.”

Dorian put a hand on Mahonen’s wrist.

“I should have known that you were stronger. I should have believed that you were like my clan, that their words could not hurt you. I would not get angry if that man insulted my clan, because my clan was better than him.” He took a deep breath. “You are as good as any Dalish born, _ma vhenan._ It was wrong of me to act as if you were weak. I may still get angry in the future, but I will learn.” He kissed Dorian’s forehead.

“Mahonen—“ Dorian said, and buried his face in the Inquisitor’s chest.

He shed only a few tears. He did not know what he was crying for—for the child that his lover had been or for a whole Dalish clan or for the cruelty of people or for his terrible fear that he was falling in love, and that was far too dangerous for words. Mahonen stroked his back. “ _Ara ma’athlan vhenas…ara ma’athlan vhenas…”_

When the tears were gone, he lay quietly in the Inquisitor’s arms, content to be stroked. But he had only learned one sure-fire way of driving out sorrow—his own, or someone else’s. After a time, he lifted his head and began to trail kisses along Mahonen’s collarbone.

The elf leaned on one elbow and raised his eyebrow, smiling. “Are you sure? It was a long ride we had…”

“I’ll show _you_ a long ride,” growled Dorian, straddling him.

Their lovemaking was as quiet as they could make it. The walls were much thinner here than at the top of a stone tower, and both of them knew it. But Dorian could not keep quite silent, particularly when Mahonen caught his hips and bucked against him, driving deep inside the mage’s body.

“Yes,” he heard himself saying hoarsely, “yes, like that—there— _please—“_

Mahonen made a noise deep in his throat, back arching, and then the two of them were moving urgently together, burying their cries against each other’s skin.

Passion gave way to exhaustion, and then, swiftly, to sleep. Dorian thought _Just for a moment, then I’ll get up…_ as his eyes closed, with the Inquisitor’s arms around him, and then the moonlight was streaming in on two sleeping bodies in one bed.

 

* * *

 

A little before dawn, Iron Bull padded into the room. He stood looking down at the two of them, his expression fond and rather exasperated, and then cleared his throat.

Dorian shot upright. The Inquisitor rolled silently off the bed and came up with his greatsword in his hand.

“Stand down, Lavellan,” said Bull. “We’re not under attack. But if you’re still trying to be discreet, the servants will be up and about soon.”

“Thanks,” muttered Dorian, throwing on his robe. Mahonen sighed, but did not protest.

“So did you ride him like a pony?” asked Bull, holding the door open.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Dorian. “I rode him like a prize halla, thank you _very_ much,” and shut the door on the sound of the Inquisitor laughing.


	5. Chapter 5

They rode out just after dawn. Dorian didn’t precisely regret having spent the night so energetically, but he was definitely regretting that they were moving on so early.

“Couldn’t we have had breakfast first? Or brunch? Like civilized people?”

“Brunch...” Bull shook his head in disbelief.

“No brunch under the Qun?”

“The Qun teaches that all should be fed, not that they should all get poached eggs and little individual quiches.”

“And I thought the way they treated mages were barbaric…”

Fortunately, there were rogue Templars. A fight was not as good as breakfast, but it got the blood moving. And Templars always seemed to come in groups, like a hive of wasps or a pack of wolves. By the time they stopped, at mid-day, everyone was starved and sore.

“We’re eating breakfast at noon,” said Lavellan, unwrapping a meat-pie. “That’s _like_ brunch, right?”

“I am sitting on a rock,” said Dorian. “A _bloodstained_ rock. This is not civilized.”

“Picky, picky…”

Varric gazed into his meat-pie with suspicion. “I think this one is nug-flavored. Anybody want to trade?”

“Give it here,” said Bull.

“You like nug?”

“I like not being hungry.”

“Fair enough.”

Cole gazed into the middle distance. “Grass. Lichen. Cool shadow. Smell of earth under its feet. Smell of other nug—“

“Cole, _no!”_ said the other four, more or less in unison.

“But the—“

“Kid,” said Varric wearily, “please do not narrate for a meat-pie. It’s just…people don’t like that.”

“But…”

Bull stared at his lunch and heaved a deep sigh.

When they moved on, they left behind a tiny grave, holding a solitary meat-pie with a single bite out of it.

 

The rest of the day was spent scouring the countryside, looking for any escaped enemies. There were none. Other than a hostile druffalo and a distant dragon—“Not today, Bull,”—Crestwood seemed peaceful.

They settled in for the night in a jumble of rocks that protected them on two sides. “Varric, Bull, could you go find us something to eat? Preferably _not_ nug?”

“You shoot it, I carry it?” said Bull to the dwarf.

“Works for me.”

They sauntered off.

“Cole, can you gather more firewood?”

Cole thought about this at some length. “I think so?”

The Inquisitor rubbed his forehead wearily. “Then…ah…please do so?”

“All right.”

That left two of them, sitting beside the fire.

“Clever man,” said Dorian, stretching.

“Rank has its privileges. Not many, but a few.” He wrapped his arms around the mage from behind and settled his chin on Dorian’s shoulder.

They sat like that for quite a long time, while the sun began to sink behind the hills.

"Ah, _ma vhenan_ , you have no idea how long I have wanted to kiss you here," murmured Lavellan into Dorian’s shoulder, and suited word to action. "And also here. This shoulderless armor of yours has been a torment."

"Poor Inquisitor. I had no idea I distracted you so dreadfully."

"It has been an exercise in self-control."

Dorian leaned back against Lavellan's chest and felt the whipcord muscles take his weight. The elf rested his cheek against Dorian's and let out a long sigh of contentment.

Dorian sighed too, though for more complicated reasons. "I fear that if you expecting passionate lovemaking, you will be disappointed. I have been fighting Red Templars since an unholy hour and I ache."

Lavellan laughed. "So do I, since I was the one who got you up at that unholy hour. No, I don't expect that. But I would like to hold you in my arms tonight, regardless."

Dorian swallowed hard. To actually sleep together, like lovers, instead of a quick embrace and furtively stealing away after...

"Not terrible discreet," he managed to say. "What would the others think?"

"Cole won't tell anyone in terms that they would understand. Varric keeps secrets like they were going out of style. And Bull is clearly quite aware already."

"Figured it out the morning after," said the Iron Bull cheerfully, stepping around the edge of the rocks and slinging a dead ram off his shoulders. 

Dorian started and began to pull away instinctively, but Lavellan's arms were around him, holding him close. "It's all right," the elf said quietly. "It's safe."

_Safe! It is never safe…_

_But he is not afraid. More, he is not in the least ashamed,_ thought Dorian. _Either because Dalish value sincerity...or perhaps simply because he is the Inquisitor and who has the power to shame him?_

Bull grinned down at them both and began skinning the ram with expert skill. “Don’t mind me. I like to watch.”

“Then you can watch us rub liniment on our bruises,” said Lavellan. “That’s about all I have the energy for tonight.”

“You’re no fun, boss.”

“I killed you a dragon! Just last week!”

Iron Bull got a faraway look in his eye. “Yeah…that’s true…”

Varric came up, looked at them, nodded once, and apparently that was that, so far as the dwarf was concerned.

_Well, a man so passionately in love with his crossbow probably isn’t in a position to judge other people’s relationships._

Cole reappeared, holding a single stick. “It remembers the tree.”

“That’s…okay, yeah, that’s not going to keep the fire going, kid.”

“But it remembers!”

“Memories don’t burn,” said Varric.

“The hell they don’t,” said Bull, not quite under his breath.

Everyone was silent for a moment.

“Fair enough,” said Varric, “but that sort doesn’t do much to keep the fire going. Can you bring back about twenty more like this, Cole?”

The Inquisitor sighed again, kissed the back of Dorian’s neck, and got to his feet. He began skewering strips of ram meat as Bull handed them over and setting them to cook on the fire.

“No parsley?” said Varric.

“I don’t feel like cooking fancy tonight,” said Bull, and grinned.

Dorian found that he was strangely nervous about sleeping beside the Inquisitor—and that was nonsensical, it wasn’t like sex, it wasn’t anything, you weren’t even conscious for most of it, he’d already dozed off beside him once. They’d slept in bedrolls around a fire dozens of times. He knew which of the Inquisitor’s companions snored (Bull, Blackwall) and which did not (Vivienne and any of the rogues) and which claimed they didn’t and could produce noises that rivaled a roaring dragon. (Cassandra.)

Nevertheless, when he slid into the bedroll and the Inquisitor slid in beside him, it felt…strange.

_Where do I put my arms? Which way do I face? What if my hair gets up his nose?_

Lavellan solved these problems by curling his body around Dorian’s back, slipping an arm around his waist, and dropping off as swiftly as a cat.

It took Dorian a little longer to relax. But it was warm and the Dalish man felt like a solid, protective wall, for all his smaller size.

_I could learn to like this._

_I could learn to like this a lot._

_Even thinking that is dangerous._

And yet he could hear Lavellan whispering “It’s safe,” in his ear, and that was the Inquisitor’s gift. When he told you things, you believed him, because he believed it. Even if you knew that it was completely mad.

Dorian was still mulling this over when he dropped off into sleep.

           

* * *

 

"I need an Elvish dictionary," Dorian said, standing in the painted room below Skyhold’s library.

Solas looked at him in mild disgust, but that probably didn’t mean anything. Solas looked at everything with mild disgust, as if he had found the world stuck to the underside of his shoe one day and was looking for a place to scrape it off. "The language isn’t called Elvish. Do you speak Humanish? And there isn't one."

"I know there isn't one in Skyhold. Where can I get one?"

"I mean there isn't one _at all,"_ said Solas. "Not worth having. Not here, not anywhere. You learn it from someone who speaks it. Or _thinks_ they speak it. Even the Dalish don't know a quarter of the old language, and they're wrong about at least half of what they think they know. What they speak is little better than children making up a secret language amongst themselves."

Dorian groaned. This was worse than he'd imagined. Solas was apparently in a mood today.

He eyed the murals around the edge of the room, looking for something that would smooth the conversation over. Nothing immediately presented itself.

He gritted his teeth. "All right. Then can you translate a word for me?"

"I can but try." Solas steepled his fingers and looked over them, as mild as if he had not just delivered a minor diatribe on the failings of the Dalish.

_"Ma vhenan._ " 

Solas's eyes were never warm, but they grew suddenly chilly. "He calls you _that_ , does he?"

The flare of anger Dorian felt surprised him. He took lovers lightly. He was never serious. He was supposed to be flippant about this sort of thing.

He had a strong urge to flippantly shake Solas until the elf’s teeth rattled.

"You know, forget I asked. I'll go find someone else."

He was halfway to the door when Solas said "Stop."

Dorian looked over his shoulder.

"I will tell you," said Solas. "Because if you go fumbling about asking such things among the Dalish, they will learn that one of their finest, with blood as pure as any elvehen still living—one they counted on to sire future children—is instead spilling himself in a human. Of the Tevinter Imperium, no less.”

Dorian snorted. “Well, perhaps they would be consoled that the Tevinter would not be particularly keen on it either!”

Solas’s lip curled. "As you say. Though, if it consoles _you_ , the Dalish would loathe you far more if you were female and in their clansman’s bed. _That_ would be a betrayal. You are simply…in poor taste.”

“How very enlightened of them.” Dorian started for the door again.

“Stop. Listen to me, Dorian.” Solas’s voice was never loud, but Dorian stopped again. “If you flaunt this before them, they will say things that he will not forgive. The Inquisitor cannot afford to make an enemy of his own people, and even less can they afford to make an enemy of him."

Dorian folded his arms and met Solas's eyes squarely.

Surprisingly, it was the elven apostate who looked away first. "Ma vhenon," he said, sighing. " _My heart."_


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Iron Bull should just charge by the hour for therapy.

The War Room doors opened and the Inquisitor stepped through, to find his advisors and Dorian standing around the great table there.

The sun coming in through the wall backlit the Dalish man in gold. Out of his armor, he seemed a slight, narrow-shouldered figure to carry so much weight.

“You rang?” he asked, pulling the door closed.

No one spoke for a moment, then Cassandra said “Yes.”

Lavellan shot Dorian a questioning look. The mage gave a small shrug—he’d received a summons to the War Room and had no more idea that the Inquisitor did.

Well. No, that was probably not true. Dorian looked at the four counselors standing at the table and could form a pretty good idea of what was going on. Cullen looked sour and Leliana looked expressionless and Josephine looked mortified and Cassandra looked grim.

His heart sank into his stomach and stayed there, churning up bile.

“There is something that I fear we must discuss,” said Josephine. Her accent became even thicker with distress.

“Oh?”

“It is a question of...appearances.”

Lavellan folded his arms. He had a faint, ironic smile on his face, which Dorian recognized. He had worn that same smile in Corypheus’s future, unbolting the Iron Bull’s manacles from the wall.

“Fought an army of demons,” Bull had said. “Don’t recommend it.”

“Sounds unpleasant,” the Inquisitor had said, holding up the Qunari, still wearing that smile. “Not boring, though?”

“Oh, definitely not.”

It was a smile, Dorian had learned, that meant that everything was breaking past all mending, but the Inquisitor was going to face it down, and hell if the enemy was going to see him falter.

He looked across the table at the advisors and thought _He sees them as the enemy_ and that was not a good thought to be having.

He suspected that Josephine recognized it. Leliana certainly did.

Despite this, Josephine explained the threat in very clear words. Orlais. Tevinter. The delicacy of the possible alliance. The impression that it would give, if it was learned that the Inquisitor had a Tevinter lover.

(“And a _mage,”_ added Cassandra, wrinkling her nose before she realized what she was doing.

“I’m in a circle, you know,” said Dorian.

“A Tevinter circle,” said Leliana quietly, and that was all that needed to be said.)

When she finished speaking, the Inquisitor stood looking at her while she stared at her clipboard.

“You are saying that if Dorian and I are known to be in a relationship, the Orlesians will balk at an alliance,” said the Inquisitor.

“That is correct,” said Leliana.

“So…don’t tell them?”

Leliana met his eyes squarely, and for once, Lavellan’s dropped first. The spymaster did not even need to speak aloud.

There was no hiding anything. Everything came to light, usually at the worst possible time.

The Inquisitor was always calm. The Inquisitor was cool water. Dorian watched the Inquisitor’s fingers close on the edge of the War Table, the knuckles go red, then white.

“Even this?” he said softly. “This, too?”

All of them knew what he was saying. _Even this, you require me to give up?_

“It is the Game,” said Josephine. Of all of them, Dorian thought that she was the one who truly felt anguish over this. Josephine still believed in love, despite everything. “The civil war…the empire…everything is hanging by a thread. The empress dare not court any alliance that is…tainted.”

“Tainted!” Lavellan laughed. “Has she _met_ us? A Dalish with a hand that closes rifts, a handful of apostates, a spirit that wanders about stealing turnips—Iron Bull— _Mythal!_ No one introduce her to Sera.”

“Tevinter is different,” said Leliana, and that was the end of jokes.

“They will say you were enspelled with blood magic,” said Dorian abruptly. “Mother Giselle loves you, and she tried to warn us.”

Lavellan swung his gaze to Dorian. “You’re taking their side?”

“I am taking the _Inquisition’s_ side!” snapped Dorian.

There was silence in the War Room. Dust motes shifted in the sunbeams.

Josephine could not look at either of them. Her lilting Antivan voice was suddenly reduced to a croak. “I…I have prepared a list of acceptable paramours, if the issue is…”

“Acceptable paramours!” Dorian burst out laughing, sharp as a fox-bark. “Oh, that is a _beautiful_ phrase, Lady Ambassador!”

_Weren’t you just cursing her, a few weeks ago, for not having provided someone?_

_Yes. But that was before._

The strength of his jealousy shocked him. He had always held pleasure lightly, moved on after. He had a strong sense of his own worth. Jealousy was for other, lesser beings.

And he would go down every name on Josephine’s list and set them on fire if they so much as glanced at Lavellan. He would freeze them and shatter them into a thousand pieces. He would…he would…

“Dorian,” said the Inquisitor quietly, cutting off the laughter like a knife.

He would do none of those things.

He knew what he had to do. He was fire and flippancy, yes, but there was steel underneath. The future was at stake. If the Inquisitor was thought to be tainted by Tevinter, then the Empress would not trust him. If the Inquisition did not stop the assassins, the Empress would be murdered. Orlais would fall to Corypheus and the world would end in Blight and darkness.

_Very well._

The Inquisitor faced his advisors. “This is not negotiable,” he said. “My relationship with—“

“May I speak with you in private, Inquisitor?” said Dorian.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There was a small room off the War Room. It was not much used and had not been repaired. It had no windows, but that didn’t matter, because there was a hole in the wall that let a great deal of sunlight through. Frost had formed on the edges of the stones.

The Inquisitor was no longer smiling.

“Dorian,” he began. “I won’t lose you to—“

Dorian made a short, sharp gesture with one hand. “Enough,” he said. “This has been a delightful interlude, but it’s gone far enough.”

Mahonen blinked.

The mage sighed. “Look,” he said. “I had a great desire to bed you. And I’ve done that. And it was pleasant enough, but certainly not worth ending the world over.”

Mahonen blinked again.

“I…what?”

Dorian looked into the Dalish man’s face. At the moment, it was full of simple bafflement. In a moment, it would begin to shade into hurt. And then…

_Don’t think. Just do it. Tear the bandage off, all at once._

This did not feel like a bandage. This felt like a mortal wound, and he could not give the slightest indication that it hurt or he would be undone.

“We’re done,” he said. “I hopped into your bed and I’ll now hop out just as swiftly. Orlais need not be concerned.”

Mahonen stared at him.

“Are you doing this just to be…politically expedient? Because you’re worried about Orlais?”

_Yes._ “No. Not entirely. Obviously it was inevitable, but this is as good a reason as any.”

The elf put his hand to his head, then pulled it away, as if he expected to find his fingers covered in blood. “Dorian? Are you…what are you saying? Are you leaving?”

“No!” His own venom astonished him, and he had to rush to amend it. “Not until this is done. Corypheus was a magister—he’s as much mine to deal with as yours.” That was easy to say. That was entirely true.

“But…”

“I believe in the Inquisition’s goals,” Dorian said fiercely. “I believe in _you._ Never doubt it! But I believe in you _as the Inquisitor.”_

He saw the realization settle. He actually saw the shift, in that moment, from Mahonen, who had loved a Tevinter mage, to the Inquisitor, who used what tools he must.

“And that means what, precisely?” said the Inquisitor.

“I’ll blast your enemies with fire. I will stand on the sidelines and cheer wildly,” said Dorian. “But I’ve no desire for anything from you, personally, beyond sex, and—forgive me, Inquisitor—I can get that anywhere, in varying degrees of skill.”

“...I see.”

“And friendship,” amended Dorian hurriedly. “I would like to be friends. I thought we were.”

The Inquisitor looked at him silently.

Dorian sighed. “And I’ve made a hash of that, haven’t I? Do you not flirt, here in the South?”

_Oh Maker, don’t listen to me, don’t listen to me, I would follow you to hell on my knees, I will die thinking of you saying my name, please don’t listen but you_ have _to listen I can’t let the world end just because I want you—_

Lavellan turned away and Dorian felt a small, sick triumph.

It was working.

The lines of Lavellan’s back were eloquent of distress. Dorian wished, irrationally, that he could have done this while the other man was in armor. In armor, the Inquisitor was large and fierce and imposing. In the loose jacket and tunic that he wore in Skyhold, he looked vulnerable and…small.

_No. No, if I stop, I’ll never start again. Keep going._

“Why?” said Lavellan.

“Who wouldn’t want to fuck the most powerful man in Thedas, at least once?” asked Dorian. “Out of curiosity, if nothing else?"

"And I suppose King Alistair wasn't available?" asked Lavellan dryly.

Dorian laughed. It felt like a knife in his lungs. "Oh, bah. I really do have faith, you know. You’ll move empires and I’ll lean back and say ‘Yes, I knew him when. Carnally, even.’” He shrugged. “And it was fine, don’t get me wrong, but it’s certainly not worth making Orlais testy about.”

There was silence. Even the wind had died down. Dorian found himself talking to fill it. “In Tevinter, we hold these things lightly. I thought you did, too. Oh dear. Is this a Dalish thing? I admit, I’d never bedded a Dalish before. Which was also part of the appeal, of course.”

He heard the words come out of his mouth. And he felt a snap, as visceral as a bone breaking, as if the future had been pulled grinding from its socket and yanked into a new course.

_I have said the unforgivable._

_I believe that it just worked._

The Inquisitor nodded slowly, once, almost to himself.

He turned back.

He did not smile, ironically or not. He looked Dorian in the face and his heart was in his eyes and Dorian wanted to throw himself at Lavellan’s feet.

Then the Inquisitor placed his fist over his heart and dropped to one knee in front of Dorian.

Dorian recognized it, of course. It was the way that all the agents knelt to the Inquisitor. Swearing their fealty, one after another. But here it was the Inquisitor kneeling to him.

_Oh Maker, what is he doing? No, no, not to me, never to me…amatus, please…_

He wanted to grab Lavellan by the shoulders and beg him to get up. He didn’t dare, because if he said one more word, he was going to begin weeping or beg forgiveness or admit the truth—that he hadn’t meant any of those things he’d said, he was just trying to save the Inquisition, and a man that he was hopelessly in love with, from being completely undone.

_Without Orlais, Corypheus will overrun us. He will crush my homeland. My friends will die in prison cells with red lyrium in the veins, and you, amatus, he will punish you for a thousand years, he will take the throne of the gods and chain you to its foot for having dared to defy him…_

A moment passed. The beams of light from the missing stones illuminated Lavellan until he looked like a stained glass figure, like the knight that all the chevaliers of Orlais could only dream of being.

Dorian felt his heart shattering in his chest, a pain so real and immediate that for a moment, he was afraid that he was dying.

Lavellan looked up at him, impassive, his face all hard planes and angles. No one would ever mistake it for a human face.

Dorian knew that his own face reflected anguish, but it was more than he could do to hide it.

The Dalish stood, inclined his head a fraction, and then turned on his heel and walked from the room. A moment later, Dorian heard the great War Room door open and swing closed.

_He didn’t even slam the door._

That seemed, in that moment, like the worst sign of all.

It was Josephine, finally, who opened the small door and peered around it. “Dorian?” she asked. “Dorian…are you…is everything…?”

He wanted to hate her in that moment, her and her ‘acceptable paramours.’ He hated how sad her eyes were, because that meant that she knew what she had asked him to do, and knew what it was costing him, and that meant that he _couldn’t_ hate her, not really. Antivans understood political expediency, and they knew what it sometimes cost.

“The Inquisitor and I will no longer be an issue,” he said. His voice didn’t crack, and he was proud of that much. He straightened his robes and walked past her, out the door.

Cullen and Leliana stared at him, then looked away. Cassandra put her hand over her face.

If any of them had apologized, he might have set the War Room on fire and himself along with it, but they did not.

He pushed the great wooden door open and went to go get falling down drunk.

 

* * *

 

 

Bull found him dead drunk in the inn about three hours later.

Bull knew, of course. Bull knew everything. He and Leliana were tighter than two ticks on a Southern dog’s ass. Hell, she’d probably talked it over with him first.

“I am the most wretched creature in existence,” he informed Bull.

“If you’re drinking that swill, no wonder. You want to talk?”

“No,” said Dorian. “I do not want to _talk._ I want to _die._ I want to wallow in misery and make everyone else as miserable as I am.”

“I’ll have what you’re having, then.”

The bartender brought another tankard of what could, if you were feeling particularly generous, be called “brandy,” because it was illegal to sell lamp oil in a bar. Brandy was not supposed to be served in tankards, but glassware was extremely hard to come by in a war zone.

“Stupid Orlais,” said Dorian. “Stupid alliance. Stupid Corypheus. Stupid me, thinking I could have anything worth having…”

“Ah…maybe we shouldn’t have this conversation in public,” said Bull.

“Don’t care,” said Dorian. “Doesn’t matter, does it? World needs to know we’re not together. The wicked Tevinter mage is no longer enspelling the virtuous Inquisitor.”

The Qunari picked him up with one hand, picked up the drinks with the other, and carried him off to the corner. Dorian did not mind this because his drink had come with him.

“I did it,” he said. “Leliana ought to be proud of me. I did it. The greater good. The future. He wouldn’t have, but I twisted the knife. Twisted it _hard.”_

“Okay,” said Bull. “Hold that thought.”

The Chargers drifted together, seemingly at random, and settled in a semi-circle with their backs to the corner. One of them started singing something. Like all tavern songs, it involved clashing tankards and the words “hey-ho!” and drinking. Dorian hated them all impartially and wondered if any of them were on the list of acceptable paramours.

“Who am I kidding?” he asked Bull. “Probably everyone’s on the list. Except me. And Krem, because he’s Tevinter. And maybe you.”

“List?”

“Josephine’s list. Of people it would be acceptable for the Inquisitor to fuck.” He let out a laugh, or maybe a sob, and put his forehead down on the corner table.

“Hey-ho!” sang the Chargers, and banged their tankards together.

“I bet that’s a helluva list,” said Bull. “Damn! Now I wonder if I’m on it.”

“You’re Qunari,” said Dorian. “Which is bad. But not as bad as being Tevinter.” He sighed. After a moment, it seemed like that might have been insulting, so he added “No offense.”

“You’re fine,” said Bull.

“I am _exquisite_ , you barbarian.”

“Sure, yeah, that too.”

“Do you know,” said Dorian miserably, not looking at Bull, “do you know that I envied you?”

“Huh?”

The mage shook his head. “When we lost Haven. I was sure I’d lost him too. And then he showed up half-dead in the snow and they dragged him into camp and the healers said to warm him up, and you…”

Bull gave a short laugh. “Probably the only time I’ll get to share blankets with the Inquisitor, and you could have iced drinks with his toes. But I do produce a lot of body heat.” He looked rather proud of this, as if his ambient temperature were a particular virtue.

“I envied you then,” said Dorian. “You got to hold him. I never had. Didn’t think I ever would. Now I never will again.” He slammed half the drink in front of him, choked briefly on the taste, then drank it dry.

“You don’t know that,” said Bull. He glanced up at Krem, flicked his fingers, and Krem came back with two more drinks.

“Is anyone paying attention to this?” murmured the Qunari.

“Not that I can tell, boss,” said Krem. He glanced over at Dorian and his face softened. “Poor bastard.”

“Don’t pity me,” snapped Dorian. “I’m pitying myself enough for everyone.” Krem gripped his shoulder for a moment, then walked away.

_Nobody’s doing that for the Inquisitor,_ thought Dorian abruptly. _Nobody’s touching him. He’s back to standing alone at the head of everything. Oh Maker…_

For all his jealousy over the idea of acceptable paramours, he knew in his heart that Lavellan would sleep alone.

“He’s done fine this far,” said Bull. “Dalish are prickly about personal space.”

Dorian looked over the rim of his drink with narrowed eyes. “Are you reading my mind?”

“You’re talking out loud, you know.”

“Am _not.”_

Bull sighed. “Fine, then I’m reading your mind.”

“I knew it,” muttered Dorian. “The horns pick it up, don’t they?”

Bull rubbed his hand over his good eye. “Yeah, sure. Are you worried about the boss?”

“Of course I’m worried about him!” snarled Dorian. “I just dumped him brutally for his own good! He wouldn’t have, you know! You know him! He always saves everyone! He went back for fucking _Blackwall!_ He’d have stood in front of me and told the whole world to go to hell. _And it would have.”_

He gazed bitterly into his drink. Bull moved it out of the way, so he gazed bitterly into the wood grain of the table instead.

“But I saw that future,” he said. “The Empress dies. Then everyone dies. _You_ died.”

“Yeah, I know. He told me.” Bull grunted. “Red lyrium in my veins, army of demons, all that. Good times.”

“I did the right thing,” said Dorian. “I did. I saved the whole _world.”_ He started laughing. “The only time I’ll ever save the world by keeping it in my pants. Oh Maker, Bull, this hurts.”

Bull put an arm around his shoulders, which was rather like being hugged by a boulder. Dorian gave a brief sob, heard himself, and stopped in horror.

“I’m not crying,” he told Bull.

“Nope,” said Bull.

(“Hey-ho!” sang the Chargers, who had an apparently endless supply of tavern songs.)

“He looked like that time. With the elves.”

“Gonna have to be a little more specific.”

“The Dalish clan. The one in the…the whatever. With all the undead everywhere. Shit, that doesn’t narrow it down, does it? The ones we helped.”

“Oh, them.”

“When we went up the first time—you weren’t there, were you? I think you were helping the Chargers clean up something. The elder looked at him and said “You’re one of the People, but we don’t know you.” And Bull—he looked like they’d punched him. No, worse. People punch him and he doesn’t even care.”

The Iron Bull lifted his tankard in salute of the Inquisitor’s ability to take a punch.

“He just had this look for just a second. He’d been so _relieved_ when he saw the Dalish camp. I didn’t even know he’d missed his people until I saw it. He practically ran. And I realized that what I thought was normal was him being so terribly lonely. And then it was like that bastard Keeper stabbed him in the gut.”

Dorian looked around for his tankard, couldn’t find it, and grabbed Bull’s instead. There was a brief wrestling match, which Dorian had no chance of winning.

“Damn you. I need another drink. You should have seen him. It was ten times worse this time. I said—I had to say—He’d—He looked—oh, Maker’s hells, Bull…”

Bull turned his chair and his body slightly so that the tavern patrons were not treated to the sight of a Tevinter mage weeping bitterly into his hands.

“Fuck,” said Dorian, very quietly, after a few minutes. “How am I going to live without him?”

“He’s not dead,” said Bull reasonably. “And neither are you. After this is all over—“

“I told him I didn’t want him any more. I told him I’d just been curious what fucking the most powerful man in Thedas would be like. And it hadn’t been interesting enough to offend Orlais over.”

Bull paused and drummed his fingers on the table. “Okay, that’s a little harder to work with.”

“I might have vaguely implied something about him being Dalish.”

Bull winced. “You didn’t say knif—“

“No! I wouldn’t! I don’t go around calling you an oxm—well, I don’t. _You_ know.”

“Yeah, and I call you a Vint all the time, so you’re one up on me.” He drummed his fingers on the table again. “Well. Still. I’m sure if you went to him and fell into his arms weeping, I’m pretty sure he’d take you back.”

“Thank you, Bull, that’s extremely helpful.”

“’Cos you’re _really_ pitiful right now.”

“Yes, I _got_ that.” Dorian scrubbed at his face with the sleeve of his robes. “Except I’m not doing it right now. I have to wait until we’ve saved the world and hope we both live that long.”

“It’s a problem, yeah.”

The Chargers embarked on a song that went “Ho, ho, _hey!”_ presumably for variety.

“Order me another drink,” said Dorian.

“I think you’ve had enough.”

“You can order me another drink or get out of my way.”

Bull looked down at him. “Or what?” He did not add “puny Tevinter” at the end, but it was definitely implied.

“Or I might sober up, and no one wants that.”

Bull sighed. “Let’s get you to bed, Vint.”

“Are you propositioning me?”

“No,” said Bull. “You will _know_ when I’m propositioning you. Trust me.”

 Dorian allowed Bull and Krem to haul him from the tavern. “I don’t suppose you’d like to?” he asked hopefully. “You’re the only person in Skyhold I won’t be able to picture is actually him.”

Krem and Bull shared a look over Dorian’s head.

 “I don’t mind the occasional pity fuck,” said Bull, “but I really don’t want to get in between a mage and a man who can walk out of the Fade with a knife between his teeth.”

“Bullshit,” said Dorian.

“Did not.”

“No, I mean…dammit. No. I mean, you’re not scared of either of us. You don’t fool me.”

They had reached the mage’s quarters. “I’ll take it from here,” said Bull to his second in command. “Just stick around the door to protect my virtue, will you?”

Krem snorted.

The Qunari dropped Dorian on his bed and wrestled his boots off. “Qunari don’t mix up love and sex,” said Bull.

“Good for you,” said Dorian into the pillow.

“Doesn’t mean we can’t recognize when other people have.”

It took Dorian a few minutes to work that one out. “…wait, what?”

He was too late. The door closed behind the Iron Bull with a soft click.

Dorian thought about crying into his pillow, like a wretched teenager, but the drinks caught up with him and he fell asleep before he could do more than sniffle.

 


	7. Chapter 7

The Inquisitor stood on his balcony and looked over the evening keep.

Nothing was ever completely dark in Skyhold. The snow on the mountains cast deep blue light over the walls, even at night. He could see orange light in the windows below, the fires burning in the courtyard, and smell woodsmoke. The sounds of singing drifted up from the tavern, mixed with the metal heartbeat of the forge.

When he had been younger, he had taken an arrow in a fight. It had slammed into his shoulder, spun him around with the force, and dropped him to the ground in a boneless heap.

It hadn’t hurt, not at first. Lavellan lay there in the dappled shade under the trees, with his cheek pressed against the leaves. The arrow jutting out of his shoulder seemed to be the size of a tree trunk. But he knew, on some level, that as long as he did not move and did not think, the pain would not touch him…and it didn’t.

He had stared at a fern in front of him. It had three fronds, the largest one still curled at the top.

His whole world slowly narrowed down to the fern. The edges of his vision grew dark, creeping inward, slowly extinguishing the trees and the arrow shaft and the blood draining out of him, until there was only green fronds, filling up the universe.

He had no memory of anything much after that point. One of the other hunters had found him and then there had been an extraordinary amount of pain and then he was waking up a day later in camp, with the healer’s worried face over his.

He stared across Skyhold now, and remembered how he had felt with the arrow in his shoulder.

As long as he stood looking at the keep, not thinking, not moving, the pain could not touch him.

In a few moments, he would have to move. He would have to walk through his bedroom and see his bed, the sheets still rumpled from last night. He and Dorian had made love there and collapsed afterward, and he had kissed Dorian’s back and called him foolish lover’s names in his own language, things that Dorian would have laughed at, if he’d been brave enough to translate them.

And then they had talked, one of those long, circular, rambling conversations that people have when they’re in bed together, that start nowhere in particular and end with laughter. He’d pressed his lips to the delicate spot between Dorian’s shoulderblades, while Dorian told him a story about a magister and a goat, and by the punchline, he’d been flopped over, gasping for air like a landed fish, while Dorian contrived to look smug and affronted all at once.

The sheets were cold now. There would be no trace of the mage’s body heat on them. If he put his nose against the pillow, he might catch the scent of clove oil and sex and human sweat, and the faint, sharp tang of magic.

Tomorrow, the servants would change the sheets and even that would be gone.

Tomorrow, the Inquisitor would be gone as well. Scout Harding had sent a report from the Western Approach. Stroud and Hawke would be waiting for them. He would go there and see what had become of the Wardens. He would take Varric, for Hawke’s sake, and no-longer-Blackwall, and…Vivienne, perhaps. Solas would be salt in an open wound. Vivienne, for all her coolness, knew what it was to love badly.

And Vivienne was as far above reproach as the Empress herself. Leliana would approve.

And the Tevinter mage that he loved more than life would stay here, free to seek out other lovers. _With varying degrees of skill._

The Inquisitor closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cold stone of the balustrade.

_Idiot. Everyone gets their heart broken. You’re not special._

He laughed at himself abruptly. _Herald of Andraste. Inquisitor. Chosen, if you believed some, by a human prophetess herself._

_All right. A_ little _special, yes._

_Just not in this._

Lavellan sighed. In a few moments, he would have to begin moving again. The world needed saving.

But for just a moment, behind his eyes, he almost thought he could see the shadow of a fern.

* * *

 

Dorian woke with the knowledge that he was history’s greatest fool.

He was too accomplished a drinker to be hungover, so he did not even have that brief respite of not knowing who he was or what he had been doing. He went from sleep immediately into wakefulness and from there into shattering insight.

_Why didn’t I just tell him to send me away?_

_I could have gone to the keep in Crestwood. Or—ugh,_ please _not Crestwood, but Val Royeaux, perhaps. Or Emprise du Lion. Or back to Redcliffe. Or off gallivanting with Harding. Somewhere. Somewhere where I could have been out of the picture and it would have been obvious that the Inquisitor slept alone and Leliana could have put about that we’d had a falling out._

They would have been parted for a few months. And yes, it would have felt like an eternity. But once Orlais was firmly allied with them, Dorian could have come home.

_Home?_

_To Skyhold. To the Inquisitor._

… _If he still wanted me._

Acid churned in his stomach, probably not because of the indulgences of the night before. He sat up in bed, then bent forward and rested his head on his knees.

_If he still wants me now._

Bull had said, last night, that if he threw himself onto Lavellan’s neck, weeping, the Dalish man would take him back.

_Let’s hope you’re right, my horned and horny friend…_

He shoved the blankets off and shrugged himself into a robe to go find Mahonen.

 

* * *

 

           

“Gone?”

The word had no meaning to Dorian at all. Neither did “Western Approach.” Neither did “This morning.”

When the words finally penetrated, after Cassandra had dragged him out of the middle of the courtyard, said them five or six times, and then shoved him into a chair and said them again, Dorian felt the acid in his stomach curdle into bile.“He _can’t_ have gone.”

“He has.”

“But I have to speak to him. I _have_ to. I’ve made a mistake—” and here Dorian began to laugh because he had done something that vastly exceeded a mere mistake. “Cassandra, you have to go and get him back!”

“Ha!” Cassandra gave a single ugly laugh and threw herself down in the chair opposite. “He’s with Hawke.”

“So?”

“So if I could _find_ Hawke, don’t you think I would have months ago?”

“Then _I_ have to go get him!”

He stood up. Cassandra hooked her boot around his chair leg and hauled it forward. It hit him in the back of the knees and he fell back in the chair again.

“Stop,” said the Seeker. “What is so urgent? Why now? Is this something to do with the Venatori?”

Dorian stared at her and began to laugh wildly. “Venatori? Kaffas! No! Much more important!”

Cassandra’s eyes widened fractionally. “More than Venatori?”

“I have to apologize! I have to tell him I’m an idiot—I didn’t mean any of it, I should never have said any of those things—”

She let out a groan and collapsed back into her chair. “Maker’s breath. Is _that_ it?”

“Isn’t that _enough?”_

“No,” said Cassandra. “Not right now. The Wardens are doing something strange and obviously suspicious. We need to find out what and we probably need Orlais to help stop it.”

“I _know_ that!”

“Then calm down!”

They stared at each other across the table.

“You could have just sent me away, you know,” said Dorian miserably. “You could have sent me anywhere. Anywhere the Inquisitor wanted me to go. Somewhere that no one would suggest I was controlling him. Until after.”

“You did not give us a great deal of time to suggest alternatives! Josephine and I _told_ them—” She cut herself off.

“What?”

She did not answer, merely looked at him.

Dorian bit his lower lip. “Told them what?”

Cassandra sighed, obviously reluctant, and stared at the wall over his head. “That he would not give you up without a fight. A fight I did not want.”

“You _don’t_ think I’m controlling him, then.”

She rolled her eyes. “I once had him chained to the floor, half-dead, with a Fade mark devouring him from the fingers up.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow.

She leaned forward and tapped the table. “And now Lavellan runs the Inquisition and I would die on his orders. If he worked for Tevinter, we’d be speaking Tevene by now. But they aren’t. Certainly not through _you.”_

“Thank you,” said Dorian. “I think.”

She shook her head slowly. “Go have a bath. You look like a bedraggled peacock and there’s nothing for either of us to do now but wait.”

 

* * *

 

 

He spent the next two weeks tormenting himself.

It would have been bad enough not knowing, but Scout Harding came back with news that the Wardens were doing…something.

“It’s not good,” she said. “It’s really, really not good. It’s…” She waved her hands helplessly. “We run into them going somewhere in the Waste, and half of them are normal and the other half aren’t.”

“Aren’t?” said Bull, sitting beside her at the bar. Dorian had the feeling that Bull found Scout Harding adorable, rather like a small, earnest puppy. She was the only person he’d never seen the Qunari flirt with, and that included Mother Giselle. (Mother Giselle had flushed, paused, and then whispered something in Bull’s ear that made him roar with laughter. Dorian had never been able to extract what that was, and Cole had said there was no pain at all associated with the memory, so he couldn’t touch it.)

Harding shook her head. “It’s like their brains have gone weird.”

“How _does_ one tell with Wardens?” asked Dorian.

Harding took the question seriously. “That’s the thing,” she said, tapping the rim of her tankard. “Most Wardens are just like us. I mean, not Blackwall. Blackwall’s more Warden than a Warden is. But they complain about the food and the sand and smell and their feet hurt and they get saddle sore and we run into them and we all complain at each other and wave and keep going.” She took a gulp of beer. “But the other ones don’t. The mages, I think. They just stand there and they don’t act like their feet hurt and they don’t complain about the sand and they just _look_ at you.”

Bull and Dorian looked at each other.

“And they don’t blink often enough,” added Harding, draining her beer.

Dorian inhaled. “ _That’s_ not good.”

Bull shook his head slowly. “When they start blinking wrong, they’re either possessed or drugged and you almost always have to kill ‘em either way.”

Harding nodded gloomily.

Dorian stopped even trying to take his mind off Lavellan.

He sat in the meditation garden. He had been pacing restlessly in the library until the Tranquil had told him (tranquilly) to leave.

The Wardens were doing something. Lavellan was out there with a Warden and no Dorian and…

_Vivienne._ Vivienne along as magical backup. Certainly she was powerful, he’d give her that, but would she pour everything she had into keeping the Inquisitor safe, or would there always be that last little scrap she kept back to protect her own skin?

_And Blackwall._ At least Vivienne was relentlessly competent. Blackwall would probably remember, in a critical moment, that he should be feeling guilty about something and start self-flagellating himself while the Inquisitor got filled full of arrows.

What if he died?

What if he died because Dorian wasn’t there to save him?

Alexius had gone mad over just such a thing. Lost his wife, losing his son, lost himself and his soul and started trying to tear the cosmos apart with both hands.

_And I told him—_

“Get over it,” said Cole, sitting on the stone wall behind him. “Candlewax. The candles have burned down wrong, the wicks need trimming. His hands hurt. The joints are swollen. It doesn’t matter now. There’s no pain that matters at all now, if she's gone.”

“Don’t _do_ that,” said Dorian grimly. “I was young and stupid.”

“Does that heal?”

“Yes,” said Dorian. “Although only because you get old and stupid, and I don’t know if that counts.”

Cole digested this.

“Does—“

“Ask Varric.”

“He’s with the Inquisitor.”

Dorian sighed. It was the only consolation he had. He trusted Varric to pull through this, and if Varric trusted this Hawke person then maybe…maybe…

He had to trust in that. He had to, or else he had to worry that the Inquisitor might die, and if he died, he would die thinking that Dorian had bedded him and tossed him aside.

In the end, he gave up and prayed. He wasn’t devout, not in any sense that really mattered, but if Andraste loved the Inquisitor, that was a sign of excellent taste on her part, and perhaps they could work from there.

He sat on the bench and thought _Andraste, if you could just keep doing what you’re doing for Mahonen, that would be good._

Then he thought _If this is not the stupidest prayer ever made, it is probably in the top ten._

_Andraste, please, let us both live long enough for me to apologize. Please bring him back to me._

He rested his head against his forearms, eyes closed.

_Oh Maker, why am I even thinking this? Why am I even concerned? He walked out of the Fade and he fought Corypheus with nothing but a trebuchet—_

_\--and nearly froze to death—_

_\--but he lived and he didn’t die and I never worried like this before, I didn’t, even when he didn’t take me with him, I knew he’d be fine, why am I so afraid now?  
_

A hand took his and squeezed.

Dorian started, looking up.

“I was wrong,” said Mother Giselle. “It seems that I have been wrong often with you.” She did not look at him, but neither did she remove her hand from his. “I am most weak, with those like you.”

“Tevinters?” asked Dorian acidly.

“The irreverent.”

“Well, guilty as charged there.”

“I take it for insincerity,” she admitted. “I should know better. I know that you and he have had a…falling-out. Yet still I find you here, praying for the Inquisitor. And you are sincere.”

“Does everyone know?” asked Dorian. “Not that I should be surprised. We were completely alone in a room with only one exit, overlooking sheer walls. Obviously the word would be halfway to Antiva by nightfall.”

Mother Giselle sighed. “It is being spread about. Leliana asked me that I not stop those rumors. She said that it would be—“

“Politically expedient,” said Dorian wearily.

She squeezed his hand again. “I only wanted what was best for him,” she said. “And I knew what would be said.”

“You knew that they would say I was his whore,” said Dorian.

He wanted her to flinch. She did not. Her face was as tranquil as the surface of the moon. “They have said that. Yes.”

“It was never like that,” he said, releasing her hand.

Mother Giselle’s back was very straight. “I know.”

They sat in silence, the Tevinter mage and the Chantry mother.

“Tell me,” said Dorian finally, “did it work? Have they stopped saying that he’s being controlled by the evil—if devilishly handsome—Tevinter?”

“Rumors take longer to die than to be born,” said Mother Giselle. “But they have suffered a blow, yes. And I have tried to help where I can. I have wronged you. I do not forget that.”

They sat together a little longer. Dorian did not know if he was still angry, or more angry, or if it was all far too pointless to be angry about. He wasn’t sure if he still knew anything at all.

She had not asked for forgiveness, which was good, because then he would have been completely unable to forgive her.

“How did you know I was praying for him?”

Giselle smiled. “You asked Andraste to bring him back to you safe. I did not think you could be speaking of anyone else.”

“No,” said Dorian. _Did I say that aloud? I don’t remember saying that aloud._

_But who even knows any more?_

After a time, she rose and walked away. Cole reappeared a few minutes later, fading into perception like a patch of sunlight slowly brightening as the clouds drifted away.

“There’s a tangle,” he said.

“There’s probably thousands of them,” said Dorian irritably. “We’re all made of pain.”

The spirit considered this. “She untangles other people’s sometimes,” he said. “But she tangled yours worse. That makes her sad. And guilty.”

Dorian wanted to feel a small, mean pleasure at that, but couldn’t muster even that.

“There’s nothing I can grab,” Cole said. “There isn’t even a smell. It’s all words. But words can’t make other words go away, except when they can. How do words even work?”

“You’ll _definitely_ have to ask Varric that one.”

Cole gazed at the sky and nodded. “I’ll ask when he gets here, then.”

“Whenever that is.“

“He’s in the pass below Skyhold now. The Inquisitor too.” The spirit frowned and pushed his hair away from his eyes, an eternally losing proposition. “Tired. Sick.”

“Sick?”

“The things they saw. Stroud threw up afterward. So did Vivienne, but she made sure nobody saw. The Wardens thought they had to do it. They give up everything. It was the only thing they had left, so they thought they had to give that up too.”

Dorian filed most of that away. The only thing that mattered was that the Inquisitor was alive and in the pass.

The rush of relief was so intense that for an instant, he thought he might be sicker than Stroud.

They would be there within the hour and then he could throw himself on Lavellan’s neck and beg for forgiveness.

_Not in public. Not in public._ Whatever grace he had earned—and Mother Giselle had helped grow—by so obviously breaking with the Inquisitor, he could not ruin it quite so quickly.

           

* * *

 

 

In the end, he had no opportunity. The Inquisitor rode in looking ten years older, threw the reins to the stablehands, and went toward the War Room with road dust still on his clothes.

Dorian watched him mount the stairs. His face was drawn as if in pain. The line between his eyes was etched more deeply than usual. His hair had grown out shaggily along the sides and he had sunburned badly. His lips had cracked and had not quite healed, and he was limping a little from an unseen wound.

_He doesn’t need to go to the War Room, he needs to go to a healer!_

Which was not a thing you could yell at your estranged lover in the middle of the courtyard if you wanted people to continue to believe in the estranged bit. He gritted his teeth.

Dorian could not very well wait outside the War Room, with half of Skyhold crowding the hall. Nor could he get to the Inquisitor’s quarters without being seen.

He finally simply collared Varric and demanded to know what had happened.

Varric told him.

Dorian listened, nodded, went to the tavern, ordered three drinks, drank them all in rapid succession, and pondered whether ordering three more would be wise or whether six would save time.

_Wardens using themselves in blood magic. Well. Of course. How efficient._

He was sitting upstairs so he had a good view of the tavern door when Lavellan came in. The Dalish man went and sat with the Chargers. Dorian could hear Bull’s gravelly rumble asking questions, and then a hiss of dismay from the mercenaries. Lavellan’s voice answered, too low to make out words, and then other Chargers chimed in...Stitches, he thought, and the elf they called Dalish, who was so obviously an apostate mage that Cullen's lips twitched uncontrollably whenever he saw her.

Dorian thought _I could go down and hear this conversation_ , and then he thought of sitting a few feet away from Mahonen with all the Chargers—who knew full well who he’d been sobbing into his wine over—around them, and then his courage failed him and he ordered three more drinks and decided to deal with it in the morning.


	8. Chapter 8

In the morning, the Inquisitor came to him.

Unfortunately, Dorian was in the library, which was not exactly private, and the Inquisitor was also addressing Grand Enchanter Fiona and Solas and the Tranquil whose name he could never remember.

Lavellan’s gaze met his for the first time in two weeks and Dorian’s stomach dropped. A smile was too much to ask, he knew that, but the Dalish man’s face was closed and wary, his deepwater eyes giving nothing away.

_Please…please…give me a chance to explain…_

“Vivienne is going to describe what we saw,” said the Inquisitor. “I do not know if there is anything useful that I can add, and her understanding of the magic is much clearer. Dorian, this is blood magic, and you have more experience with this than any of us.”

“Not directly,” said Dorian. “Except as the victim thereof, and I managed to avoid that.” Trying not to think about how his name had sounded in Lavellan’s mouth.

“Even so.”

Was he angry? Sad? Frightened? _Give me something, Mahonen, give me some idea what you are thinking, please…_

And then Vivienne began to describe the rites and Dorian forgot, for the first time in two weeks, all about his apologies.

She was a skilled observer. She left nothing out. The words, the gestures, the weapons, the way the Fade wrapped _here_ and _here_ , the terrible unity the mages showed, the blood, the Venatori, the death, the dying, the demons.

When she had finished, Fiona and Dorian stood wordless, looking at her.

Solas shook his head. “My skills are nearly useless here,” he said simply. “I know nothing of bindings of spirits.”

Dorian passed his hand over his face. “It seems straightforward,” he said. “It is blood magic of the most basic kind. A life, a death, a demon. A magister could do it in his sleep.”

“Can it be stopped, then?” asked the Inquisitor.

“Certainly. Kill the demon. Or the mage, take your pick.”

“Can it be stopped without such a drastic measure?”

Dorian looked at Fiona. Fiona shrugged helplessly.

“The Anchor disrupts connections with the Fade,” said Lavellan. “Could it disrupt such a summoning?”

“Doubtful,” said Solas, in that tone that meant _No._

“We will investigate,” said Vivienne. “We have a library and a little time before we storm Adamant.”

“Are we storming Adamant, then?” asked Dorian.

The Inquisitor nodded.

“Fabulous. I have always loved storming things. What is Adamant, precisely?”

“A fortress,” said the Inquisitor, and for an instant, Dorian thought he saw the edge of a smile.

“Well, I hear those are the best sort of thing to storm.”

“Focus, darling, focus,” said Vivienne, and the Inquisitor slipped out the door while the mages were still talking.

 

* * *

 

 

Dorian woke with the cover of a book pressed into his cheek and early morning light streaming through the window. His head pounded and his hand was cramped from writing down every scrap he could recall about summoning demons with blood.

“Darling,” said Vivienne, “you can’t read the book by sleeping on it.” Her rich voice had acquired a rasp of exhaustion.

“I’ve read the book already,” said Dorian. His tongue felt fuzzy. “It was useless as a reference, so I figured I would try it as a pillow.”

“And?”

“More useless, if possible.” He sat up, rubbing his cheek where the leather tooling had imprinted into his skin. “The whole library’s worthless.”

“Dorian, darling…”

He wanted to bristle at her tone, but… _Vivienne threw up too, but she made sure no one saw…_

“Vivienne,” he said, not bothering to hide his despair, “it’s all useless. My notes are useless. I can’t think of anything. I can’t even find a place to start. This sort of magic is the most basic kind in the world. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop the tide.”

He expected her to tell him to keep looking, to deliver some acid quip, but instead she sat in the chair next to him, looking as tired as he felt.

“I know,” she said. “I felt it. It didn’t even feel like magic.”

She laughed softly. She had a beautiful laugh, even now. Dorian, who had some idea how much time and voice training went into a laugh like that, admired it in a vague, detached way. “How did anyone _ever_ defeat the Imperium, if they could do that?”

“Because they didn’t stop at that,” said Dorian. “The old magisters were a terrible lot. But they built on the blood magic and tried to do more and more complicated things with it. Things like that, you _can_ stop. A wall can be knocked down. But this is like trying to knock down the foundations.”

He sighed and shoved the book back into its slot on the shelf. “Anyway, all this sort of magic gets you is demons. And then all you’ve got a demon. You can’t make wine out of it, you can’t sleep on it, it doesn’t keep the rain off. It’s not like they make good butlers or cooks.”

Vivienne laughed again. “Go get some sleep,” she said. “You’re starting to make sense, so one of us is clearly overtired.”

Dorian snorted and went to find something more comfortable than a book to sleep on.

 

* * *

 

 

Dorian woke in the early evening, immediately aware that he was starving.

He thought about attempting to brave the kitchens, shuddered, and went to the tavern instead. He was in no mood for well-meaning attempts at cuisine. The tavern food was mediocre, but nobody expected you to be impressed by it.

Also, there would be wine. Or brandy. Or he could just ask Bull to hit him in the head and achieve unconsciousness that way. Any of the three seemed like an excellent respite from reading about blood magic.

He was mostly done with his food when he heard the Inquisitor’s voice from downstairs.

His first instinct was to leap up and hide.

His second instinct was to leap up, grab Lavellan, and drag him somewhere where he could apologize, sob, and then, if the stars aligned correctly, move directly to make-up sex without having to relocate.

His third instinct overrode both of the first two as fatally indiscreet. He stared into his wine and thought fixedly about nothing.

Lavellan was talking to the Chargers again. That was fine. Dorian could wait until after he had been there for some time, walk by, say hello to everyone, slide a note discreetly under Lavellan’s glass saying they needed to talk in private… _yes. All right. A fine plan. Yes._

He just had to wait until it didn’t look as if he had lunged from the second story balcony to talk to the Inquisitor. That would not be discreet at all.

He drained his wineglass and poured himself another.

Lavellan said something in Elvish, and laughed.

Somebody replied.

Also in Elvish.

Dorian's head snapped up so fast that he nearly cracked his skull on the wall.

_A woman’s voice…oh, of course. Dalish. Yes, makes perfect sense. Not like it was going to be Solas._

_Why didn’t I think to ask_ her _for a translation? She’d hardly get offended by it. You couldn’t serve under Iron Bull and remain capable of being offended by anybody’s love life, unless it involved…oh, goats, probably._

Which reminded him that he should really tell Bull the one about the magister and the goat, and that got him through most of the next glass of wine, until he actually looked over the balcony and discovered that Lavellan and Dalish were sitting together at a table, sans the rest of the Chargers.

Which meant nothing, of course. Which meant that they were probably reminiscing about food or mucking out halla stalls or…whatever people who had happy childhoods reminisced about. Dorian was fairly hazy about that sort of thing, but presumably people did it.

But it also meant that he couldn’t very well go down and act natural and slide a note discreetly to Lavellan. It was often much harder to get away with things in front of one person than in front of twenty.

_Tomorrow,_ he thought grimly, _or I’m going to join the Chantry and become a sworn celibate. For at least a week._

* * *

 

 

Dorian would almost swear that Lavellan was avoiding him, and it was starting to drive him up the wall.

_What possible reason could he have to avoid me?_

_Other than the bit where I told him I only wanted to bed him because he was the Inquisitor and an elf and implied he wasn’t that great in bed and now I was done and hoped we could be still friends._

_And the other bit where we shouldn’t be seen alone together so that Orlais doesn’t get ideas._

_…fine. He’s avoiding me._

A note, that was the trick. He’d get a rogue to put a note in Lavellan’s pocket. You couldn’t get more discreet than that. The Inquisitor would find it hours later, he’d be nowhere near the scene…yes, that was good.

But not Sera, he decided immediately. He had no desire for every friend of Red Jenny to be aware that he was writing letters to the Inquisitor saying that they had to talk privately.

And Cole…well, probably not Cole, either. Dorian would have to sit down and explain precisely where the note should be and when and which pocket and that no one should see him put it there and that the Inquisitor had to read it and the Maker only knew where the actual note would end up and what condition it would be in when it got there.

That left only one choice.

“Varric,” he murmured, sitting down next to the dwarf in front of the fireplace, “I need you to get this note to the Inquisitor for me. Discreetly.”

Varric looked at him, palmed the note, and said “Sure, no problem.”

“Nobody can know it’s from me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And don’t read it.”

“Do I tell you how to throw fireballs around?”

“Sorry. You know your business.”

“I do indeed.” Varric glanced up and then yelled “Hey, Lavellan!” across the main hall.

“Vishante kaffas!” hissed Dorian, hunching down in his chair.

“Relax, Sparkler, you’re overthinking this shit.”

Lavellan, who had just emerged from the War Room, strolled over. “You rang?” His eyes moved to Dorian and his easy smile faded.

“Yeah, one of my contacts has a message for you. They’re paranoid, though.” Varric held out the note.

Lavellan leaned against the wall to unfold the note. Dorian watched him under his eyelashes, feeling a stab of anguish. Two weeks hadn’t blunted it at all.

_Why would it? You’ve been honing your misery like a dagger the whole time._

But Mahonen looked so thin, as if the desert had rasped away what little flesh was on his bones. His clothes hung too loosely. Dorian wanted to get him to a tailor, and then perhaps to a cook who knew how to make decent Tevinter comfort food, not this stuff that hadn’t even shared the same air with anything like a spice.

Then he wanted to put him to bed and ring the room with magic barriers and curl up around him and hold him until he got a decent night’s sleep with no interruptions.

The note read only _I need to speak to you in private. – D_ It should not take that long to read, even two or three times over.

Lavellan looked up.

Dorian glanced hurriedly away and pretended to be examining the cobblestones.

After a long few seconds, he looked back. _I am a noble of Tevinter, I am a thousand times better at this than the Orlesians and their stupid Game, I will show nothing that can be used against us._

Lavellan’s eyes were flat, reflective water that gave nothing back to him at all.

The Inquisitor tossed the note into the fire and said to Varric “Please tell your contact that I believe enough has been said already.”

He turned on his heel and walked away.

Dorian’s teeth clicked together.

“Sorry, Sparkler,” said Varric.

“No. No, I probably deserved that."

"If you say so."

"I’m going to sit here for a little bit,” said Dorian. “Discreetly.”

“Until you stop doing that, too.”

“Doing what?”

Varric tapped the edge of the chair, where Dorian’s arm dangled over the side. Dorian lifted his hand and gazed, in mild astonishment, at his fingers, which were encased in a quarter-inch of ice.

“Get up by the fire so nobody sees that.”

Dorian obeyed, still staring at his hand. The ice melted swiftly away, leaving a small damp spot on the stones, which hissed away into steam.

“I haven’t lost control of magic like that in years,” he said softly.

“Didn’t really look like you lost control,” said Varric mildly. “Looked like you decided you couldn’t yell or scream or punch something or cry, so you made ice instead.”

“Yes. Well.”

_I’m a mage._

_I had better start acting like one._

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Varric.

“No.”

 

* * *

 

Clandestine meetings and sneaking around and passing notes—kaffas! He was a mage, not a maggot. Of Tevinter, yes. Fine. What of it? He loved Tevinter, that beloved old sinner, even if it had lost its way.

Also, word was that they were heading out to Adamant Fortress tomorrow, so it was now or never.

He waited until late at night, went up the scaffolding from the bottom, levitated the last ten feet—god, he _hated_ levitating, it made his teeth taste like tin, and you moved about a foot a minute and if you lost your concentration, you dropped like a rock, but what was he going to do, climb?—strode up the staircase and hammered on the Inquisitor’s door.

Lavellan opened the door. He was still dressed, which was a pity, but Dorian could probably fix that if things went well.

_“Dorian?”_

“ _Don’t_ slam the door,” said Dorian, jamming his hand against the frame. “Please. I know you’re angry. I deserve it. I deserve worse. I am sorry. I should never have said any of it. I didn’t mean any of it. None of it was true. I’m an idiot. I’m worse than an idiot. I was trying to end it because if Orlais didn’t—doesn’t—you saw the future. You know. You’re the only one who knows but me.”

Lavellan tilted his head to one side, brows furrowing. A smile was starting, although whether it was from astonishment or actual humor, Dorian had no idea.

_Or he thinks it’s funny that I’m babbling. Which it probably is.  
_

“You don’t have to forgive me,” he said, quite aware that he was still babbling. “I’d certainly prefer if you did. That’s really what I’m hoping for, you understand. But you don’t have to, because I said a lot of unforgivable things but I just kept thinking that if that future came, Corypheus was going to do things to you that I couldn’t bear. Well, and to everybody else too, but that was more of a secondary concern.”

“Dorian—”

“You’re amazing. You’re better than I deserve. I’m passionately in love with you. Kaffas! I wasn’t going to say that part out loud.”

Lavellan blinked at him. “Uh…”

“I mean, I don’t know,” said Dorian, who was now careening wildly toward the emotional horizon and picking up speed. “It’s not a thing I have a lot of experience with. But I think I must be, except you’re not supposed to say that to other men because it ends badly but we’re not in Tevinter and maybe it won’t end badly here and I always thought I’d go back to Tevinter, but if I could stay with you here that might be worth it except for the food, we’ve got to do something about the food. Why am I talking about food? Did I mention that I adore you and I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life?”

“Dorian—”

“Not the adoring you bit. I mean, the bit where I said I didn’t. You know what I mean.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Please forgive me. _Please.”_

From inside the room, another voice said “Should I come back later?”

It was a female voice.

It was a female elvish voice.

It was Dalish.

 

* * *

 

 

Dorian’s mouth snapped shut so fast he nearly bit the tip of his tongue off.

He stared at Lavellan, wide-eyed. Lavellan stared back at him.

“Or…I could make an absolute ass of myself,” said Dorian. “Yes. That _does_ seem to be what I am doing. Women too? You never said.”

Lavellan raised both hands in front of him and made that complex sound that people make when four or five different things are fighting to be said at the same time, so what came out was “It’s—yes, sometimes—not what it—did you mean—women are—looks like—all a dreadful—perfectly fine—misunderstanding—” and then had to stop and breathe for a minute before he strangled on his own tongue.

“This seems like a bad time,” called Dalish. “I could come back later.”

“Not on my account,” said Dorian. “No. I have clearly interrupted you quite enough for the evening.” He bowed very deeply, because he was a Tevinter noble, _goddammit_ , and said “A pleasant eve to you, Inquisitor. Enchanter Dalish.”

“I’m not an enchanter!”

“Dorian, this isn’t what it looks—”

Dorian abandoned decorum, abandoned discreetness, abandoned political expediency, threw open the door at the bottom of the stairs and stalked out with his head held high.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is really not poor Dalish's fault.


	9. Chapter 9

Everyone rode out at dawn, whether they liked it or not.

The Inquisitor attempted to talk to him in the stables. It did not go terribly well for anyone.

“Dorian, I can explain.”

“So can I. It is not a terribly complex procedure and I understand how the parts fit together, albeit not from experience.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Undoubtedly.”

_Am I jealous? Yes. I am jealous. I am jealous of a scrawny little mage-girl that I could incinerate with a thought._

_Well…maybe two thoughts. Three at most._

Lavellan narrowed his eyes. “If you would just listen to me for five minutes—”

“Then that would be five more minutes of proof that the nasty Tevinter mage is controlling your mind. Don’t you need to go ride at the head of the column and look heroic?”

The elf took a very deep breath, let it out, and said, rather dryly, “You _know_ I’m prone to reaver berserker fits, and yet you still keep trying to piss me off…”

“No need to waste them on me,” said Dorian. “Or anything else, for that matter. I’m aware that I made my bed. I’ll lie in it. Alone.”

_“Dorian.”_

“Unlike some people.”

“Mythal’s _tits_ , Dorian, will you just—”

“Also, the stablemaster is eavesdropping, although he’s trying very hard to pretend he isn’t."

Lavellan gave a single huff of furious laughter, turned on his heel and stalked away.

“What?” said Dorian to Stablemaster Dennet. “You were.”

“Was not,” muttered Dennet.

“Just get me on this damnable mare or stallion or whatever it is, will you?”

“He’s a gelding,” said Dennet.

“Lucky him.”

 

* * *

 

 

They got to Adamant in several hundred troop-shaped pieces. Dorian avoided Lavellan unless they were in public, and then it occurred to him that Lavellan’s sense of political expediency was about as well developed as Cole’s sense of fashion, and started hiding behind Iron Bull in public, too.

He took some small pleasure that the Inquisitor was obviously sleeping alone, but this was largely overborne by the fact that the Inquisitor didn’t appear to be sleeping at all. He had a portable war table in the command tent and aides and advisors coming and going at all hours, discussing troop movements and who would attack where, when, and with what forces behind them.

Cassandra, when asked, admitted that she hadn’t seen the Inquisitor actually go to bed. “I caught him sleeping in the chair yesterday,” she said. “With his head on the table. Cullen told him to go to bed and he said the healers made up some herbal thing and he’d be fine until after Adamant.”

This did not sound safe or sane to Dorian, but granted that there was a Maker-be-damned battering ram in their train, what was safety or sanity worth any more?

For his part, Dorian shared a tent with Iron Bull. The Chargers—Dalish included—were almost the only group who hadn’t come to storm Adamant. They were guarding Skyhold, because, as Bull said, they were used to operating independently without Cullen telling them how to hold their dicks when they pissed.

“You have a gift for vivid metaphor,” Dorian told him.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

“ _Really_ vivid. It's like poetry of the gutter.”

Bull looked at him suspiciously. “Are you coming on to me?”

“No! Although, now that you mention it—”

“Not a chance.”

“I’m very good in bed.”

“I don’t doubt it. You’re also taken.”

“I am nothing _like_ taken.”

“Fine, then you’re not available.”

“I am _extremely_ available!”

The Qunari groaned. “Dorian, I have stuck my foot into enough piles of crap to recognize the smell by now. You are very sexy and other under circumstances, I would cheerfully fuck you until you couldn’t remember your own name, but I am Too. Old. For. This. Shit.”

Dorian rolled over in his bedroll and muttered to himself in Tevene.

“Also, we’ve got another twelve hours on horseback tomorrow, and I wouldn’t do that to the ass of someone I liked before a long ride.”

“Oh, now you’re just bragging.”

“It’s not my fault you humans are puny in every dimension.”

And then there were two days left on the road and everything began to collapse down into a narrow little tunnel that ended with a siege.

And then there was one day left.

And then Adamant squatted before them like a gigantic toad in the middle of the desert, warted with battlements and towers.

The circle of companions stood around the Inquisitor while he dealt them out like a pack of cards—“Cassandra, lead the left squad. Bull, with me. Blackwall, you’re on this side, and try to get the Wardens to listen to you. Varric, with me. Vivienne, with me—“

“No,” said Vivienne.

Everyone looked up at her, surprised.

“I am far more useful as a one-woman siege engine, darling. Take Dorian,” said Vivienne. “He knows more about blood magic than any of us.”

“That was hardly a compliment,” said Dorian.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Lavellan looked at him and Dorian almost said _No, take Solas_ instead, and then he looked at the Inquisitor and he remembered arms holding him in the dark in the keep at Crestwood, and the words _ma vhenan_ murmured in his ear and he thought of what would happen if the Inquisitor did not come back and the jealousy coiling in his gut said _what does it matter_ and the rest of him stomped it down hard and he said “Of course I’ll go.”

“I am not sure—” began Lavellan.

“You may need someone who speaks Tevene,” interrupted Dorian. “And I do know what blood magic looks like, and even how to derail some of it, in case they’ve done something…” he grimaced “…clever.”

The Inquisitor nodded. Then it was back to business. “Vivienne, answer to Cullen, then. Sera, you’re with the archers, and leave them some pocket change to go home with. Cole, Solas, I will leave you two together. Determine where you will be most useful, inform Cullen, and make it happen. Does anyone have any questions?”

They all looked at each other. No one spoke. Behind Bull’s back, Dorian reached out a hand and laid two fingers on Vivienne’s wrist in wordless gratitude.

Lavellan licked his lips. “If any of us don’t come back—if _I_ don’t come back—it has been an honor to know all of you.”

“Don’t talk like that. We’ll kick its ass, boss,” said Bull.

“Do demons even have asses?” asked Varric in an undertone.

“The desire demons certainly do,” said Dorian.

Solas made a disgusted noise.

“Rage demons don’t have asses. Pride demons sort of do…”

“Despair demons might under those nasty robey things,” volunteered Sera.

As if compelled, everyone looked over at Cole.

"What?" said the spirit. "Have I? I don't know. Varric?"

"Uh...."

“Annnnd on that note,” said Lavellan. “Move out.”

They moved out.

           

* * *

 

“Sorry,” said Varric. “I think I ruined the moment.”

“Thank Mythal,” said Lavellan. “I thought I was going to have to give an inspiring speech. That was much better.”

He looked over at Bull and Dorian, and his lips tightened.

“Dorian—”

“We’re preventing the future, Inquisitor,” said Dorian. “You and I can agree on _that_ , I hope?”

Lavellan sighed. “Yes. We agree on that.”

“Good. Then that’s enough.”

They walked toward the keep and stood, a little to one side, waiting for the ram to do its heavy work. The sounds of steel pounding on wood echoed like a heartbeat across the Wastes.

“ _You know, I speak pretty decent Tevene,”_ said Bull, in Dorian’s own language.

_“Not with that accent, you don’t.”_

_“It’s fine. You wanted an excuse.”_

_“Did not.”_

Lavellan cocked his head at them.

“Bull’s trying to impress me with his mastery of Tevene,” said Dorian.

“And?”

“It’s better than my Qunlat, let’s leave it at that.”

“Pfff. You don’t know a word of Qunlat,” said Bull.

_"May you die dishonored and displaced from the Qun, may the sea scour your bones until only the memory of your dishonor remains.”_ Dorian considered. “Also, I can ask for the bathroom.”

“Well, yeah, not gonna lie, you can get pretty far on just those two…”

Ka-GONG! Ka-GONG! The battering ram was definitely making progress now.

“Right, I can’t take it any more,” said Lavellan abruptly. “Dorian, she was reading a book.”

“Huh?”

“Dalish,” said Lavellan irritably. “She was reading a book. She was on the list of Josephine’s acceptable paramours, because apparently humans think it’s fine if elves are with other elves.”

“I really don’t want to hear— _”_

“Shut up and listen. _That’s an order.”_

Bull wandered over to Varric and said “Hey, how about this weather we’re having?”

“Sandy,” said the dwarf. “Very sandy.”

“She agreed to help me make it look as if I was having an…acceptable…relationship so that people would stop gossiping about you and I more quickly.”

Dorian stared at him.

“Might be more sand tomorrow, too.”

“Could be, could be. Or even next week.”

“I have made love to women in my time, and it is perfectly fine with the right woman, but she is not one of them. I have absolutely no interest in her as anything but a friend, and the feeling is entirely mutual.”

“Well, I shouldn’t complain. We need the sand.”

“Yeah, you’d hate for there to be some kind of shortage.”

“So yes.” Lavellan folded his arms. “She was in my quarters, and she was _reading_ a _book.”_

“Might lead to sand rationing.”

“Nothing worse than having to stand in line for hours to get a jug of sand.”

“…oh,” said Dorian, in a very small voice.

The jealous worm coiled in his stomach curled up and turned into shame.

He wanted to ask what it meant, whether it meant anything, whether the Inquisitor hated him now or he’d blown his chance or if there had never been a chance to begin with—but there was suddenly an extraordinary crash of falling masonry and dust roiled up from Adamant.

The doors of hell had been forcibly smashed open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, I wanted to do a tender and compelling scene full of longing and pathos, but then Bull and Varric got started on the sand and it kind of got away from me...


	10. Chapter 10

For the rest of his life, Dorian could never remember very much about that terrible run through Adamant. It seemed like a fever dream, with tiny, clear moments surrounded by fire and screaming.

There was a moment when a rage demon picked up a rock the size of a barrel and threw it at Hawke’s skull and Dorian turned it to ice so that it shattered in mid-air and pattered off his armor like hail, and Hawke turned his head and said “Thanks.”

There was a young Warden, one of the mages, the whites of his eyes visible all around the pupil, staring down at his blood-stained hands. The expression on his face as he realized what he had done would have broken a far harder heart than Dorian’s.

There was a truly dreadful moment when Dorian looked up into the face of the Archdemon, down the long tunnels of nostrils and the wet chasm of its mouth, framed by the pillars of the hallway. It inhaled, in the manner of a dragon preparing to breathe fire, and he thought _I have to move_ but he couldn’t seem to make his legs work.

The Inquisitor grabbed him by the shoulder, yanking so hard that it spun him around completely, and they both slammed into the wall. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he gasped for air, while only a few feet away, the dragon’s breath was splattering against the stones.

It wasn’t quite fire, it was something else, but Lavellan’s body was between him and the blast. For what seemed like an eternity, the roaring of the dragon mixed with the shaking of the keep, so loud that it blotted out sound and thought and everything else. There was only fear and the slim-hipped man pressed against him, keeping death at bay.

At last the dragon ran out of breath and tore itself out of the hallway, yowling like a cat that had been denied a mouse.

“All right?” Lavellan said in his ear.

Dorian nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

And then there was more fire and more screaming and more blood and Wardens died and mages killed them and that Venatori bastard laughing and that last Warden, the woman with her steel-gray hair and her steel-hard spine, facing down the demon—

Varric told him later that the entire tower collapsed. Dorian had no memory of that at all. Only of running and falling and a terrible noise, and then a sickly, familiar green light that wiped away everything, even thought.

 

* * *

 

  

“What happened?” Dorian’s eyes were crossed and there was blood coming out of his nose.

Lavellan helped him to his feet and tried not to think about how close they had all come to dying.

_Unless we’re already dead, which is possible. Perhaps even likely._

“Where are we?” said Dorian.

“Ah, “said Lavellan. “We were rather hoping you’d be able to tell us.” He continued holding Dorian upright, even though the mage probably didn’t need it, because if they were all about to fade away to the afterlife, Lavellan would like his last memory to be of Dorian’s body against his.

Dorian pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his bloody nose. “How would _I_ know? There was a dragon and things fell down and I think a rock hit me on the head…”

“Well, it’s just that you’re a mage,” said Varric. 

Green light pulsed around them. It climbed in spidery tendrils up things that might have been fog or stone walls or an impossible combination of both. Voices whispered overhead, too distant or too soft to understand. Rocks floated. Varric kept looking at the rocks as if they were doing it deliberately to annoy him.

Dorian looked slowly in all directions and broke into shocked laughter. “Oh Maker! This is the Fade, isn’t it?”

Lavellan sighed. “It looks that way,” he admitted. “We were hoping you’d be able to…um….a magicky thing…” He wiggled his fingers.

“No. I cannot do a _magicky thing_ and get us out of here.” He started laughing again. Lavellan had heard men laugh like that when they took a mortal wound— _well, we’re doomed, what are you gonna do?_

“So we’re in the Fade,” rumbled Iron Bull. The Qunari appeared to think this over for some time. “Well…shit.”

“My sentiments exactly,” said Varric, glaring at the floating rocks.

A shade appeared out of the mist. Bull smacked it over the head with his axe and it sank, squalling, into the floor.

“Stuff still dies,” he reported.

“That’s encouraging,” said Hawke.

Another one appeared, and Lavellan had to release Dorian so that he could slam his greatsword through it. He wondered if the human man was also disappointed by this.

“We can’t be in the Fade,” said Dorian. “I mean, not _really_. Nobody goes into the Fade physically. Not since the magisters…and that was thousands of years…” He shook his head, winced, and dabbed at his nose again. 

“So this _isn’t_ the Fade?” said Lavellan hopefully.

“Oh, it’s the Fade, all right.” Dorian poked a finger at what appeared to be a dining room table suspended in midair.

“So we’re in the Fade,” said Hawke.

“No, that’s impossible.”

“But you just said…” said Lavellan.

“I _know_ what I said!” Dorian flailed the bloody handkerchief at him. “I am in denial, thank you very much! We have done an impossible thing that violates all the laws of men and gods, assuming you believe in those!”

“ _Do_ we believe in them?” asked Varric. “Out of curiosity?”

“Seems dumb to start believing in them now,” said Hawke.

Stroud said nothing. That was normal. Stroud rationed out words like he was anticipating a global shortage of nouns.

“Okay,” said Lavellan, clasping his hands together on his greatsword. “We have established that we are in the Fade. It is not possible, but here we are.”

“You did it,” said Dorian. “With your hand…thing. Of course. Corypheus wanted to physically enter the Fade, so he made a thing to do it, except now you’ve got it, and here we are. It makes perfect sense.”

“Great!”

“…except that it’s impossible.”

“Glad that we’ve cleared that up.”

“Man, the weirdest shit happens to you,” said Varric to Lavellan.

“Maybe it just happens to _you._ After all, you’re here with me.”

The dwarf looked briefly thoughtful. “Mmm…nah.”

Another shade appeared. Stroud cut off its head, or at least separated the top chunk of ectoplasm from the larger chunk under it, which had much the same effect.

“So,” said Lavellan, because someone had to say something, and he was the Inquisitor. “Do we go forward? Stay here?”

“Can you do something with your hand?” asked Varric.

Lavellan looked at his hand. He had flung it out, purely by reflex, as they fell, and somehow he had sliced open the sky. He was not sure how he had done it, or if there was a way to reverse the effect.

He shook his wrist. Nothing interesting happened.

“I don’t think so.”

All of them sighed.

“Well, we aren’t getting anywhere standing here,” said Bull. He looked older and more drawn than Lavellan could ever remember him looking.

_It’s the light. This light is dreadful._

“Onward, then,” said the Inquisitor. “That looks like stairs over there.”

They did indeed look like stairs, as much as they looked like anything. They went up a ridiculously long way.

Lavellan squared his shoulders and led the way.

 

* * *

 

At the top of the stairs was a ghost, or a spirit, or the soul of the Divine. It was not entirely possible to tell which.

It spoke to them, and Lavellan spoke back. He wasn't entirely sure what he said, except that those seemed to be the words that he needed to say, and the spirit said something else, something hopeful, and then it went away again. 

Lavellan was conscious of a strange feeling of peace, and, simultaneously, the sensation that every hair on his body was standing on end.

“Well,” he said, into the silence that followed. “Well.”

“Fight a terror demon,” said Bull. “The great-grandaddy of all terror demons. Sure. Piece of cake. Point me at it.”

Lavellan glanced at him, and was reminded suddenly of how he had sounded seeing the enemy advance on the Chargers, many weeks ago.

_And that is what Bull sounds like when he is frightened out of his wits. Of course. I should have guessed._

When they went forward, he dropped back and caught Bull’s forearm. _The prize halla, attempting to comfort an aurochs twice his size…_ “You all right?”

“Heh. No.”

“Okay. Is there anything I can do?”

“Promise you’ll kill me if it takes me over?”

“I will kill you so dead that _undead_ will say ‘Wow, that Bull guy is really, really dead.’”

Bull snorted. After a minute he said, “Thanks, boss. Just don’t tell the Chargers that’s how it happened, okay?”

“As far as they’re concerned, you died of sexual exhaustion on top of a pile of virgins. On top of a dragon.”

“See, boss, you really _get_ me.”

Lavellan looked up ahead at his friends. Varric still seemed more bemused than anything else. He and Hawke were talking quietly. The Hero of Kirkwall seemed…well, glad to have someone else in charge for a change, actually. _Damn. And here I was hoping…oh well. Some day some kid will come in and start giving me orders._

_Assuming we live so long._

Stroud…well, there was no telling with Stroud, of course.

And then there was Dorian.

When they had entered Adamant, Lavellan had still been angry and exasperated and more than a little hurt. This lasted right up until he had seen a pride demon draw back its fist to put through the mage’s head.

He had absolute no memory of what had happened after that, except that the demon had melted away under his hands before he was anywhere near done pummeling it. Iron Bull had actually dealt him a ringing slap on the back of the head and growled something and Lavellan had spat something back at him in Elvish.

“I _said_ , it’s dead, boss.”

“I…oh. Yeah.” Lavellan shook his head violently, sweat flying from the ragged ends of his hair. “Sorry. Got lost for a minute there.”

“Heh. You think I don’t know how that goes?”

Meanwhile, Dorian had been on the other side of the courtyard, cheerfully oblivious to how near a miss he’d had with the demon. _Safe. Safe for now._

There was blood on Dorian’s clothes and smoke curling from his fingertips. His face was streaked with ash. Lavellan could not remember ever seeing him look more beautiful.

If they had not been in the middle of Adamant, surrounded by Calling-crazed Wardens and Venatori bastards, he would have dragged the mage down to the ground right there and rutted like a boar.

_Down, boy. That’s the dragon blood talking._

It was talking _awfully_ loudly.

_Well, you can’t have blood-lust without lust…_

And then things had gotten worse—astonishingly worse—quite extraordinarily worse—and here they were. In the Fade.

Dorian glanced back at him, perhaps feeling the Inquisitor’s gaze on him, and gave him a small, sheepish smile.

_Oh Mythal, let it not be too late for us to work this out…_

“It is much, much too late,” said a deep voice that seemed to come out of the ground. “Much too late indeed.”

“Oh _fuck_ no,” whispered Bull.

The terror demon had found them.


	11. Chapter 11

“I have decided that I don’t like terror demons,” said Dorian.

“I’m sure they’re devastated,” said Varric.

“Well, they ought to be.”

They were standing in the middle of what might have been misty water or watery mist. There were dead things around them. The things looked like spiders, if you didn’t look too closely.

Dorian _had_ looked closely at one of them, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and had promptly lost his breakfast in the corner.

Lavellan waited until he had finished, then silently handed him a canteen. Dorian washed his mouth out, spat a few times, and then said, “I suggest not looking too closely at those things.”

“I’ve been trying to avoid it,” said Hawke.

“What are we not looking at?” asked Varric.

Bull muttered something. It was impossible to tell what language he was muttering in, but everybody got the gist anyway.

“Yes, that,” said Dorian. “Only more so, and with extra legs.”

“Look on the bright side,” said Lavellan. “You’re quite possibly the first human in history to puke in the Fade.”

“Oh. Yay.”

“Only the first _human?”_ asked Hawke, sounding amused.

“The ancient elves made many marvels. I suppose it’s not impossible that one of us did it first. Sadly, they seem to have left that out of the histories.”

“Please let me be there when you ask Solas,” said Dorian. “I will pay money.”

“Do you not like my children?” asked the Nightmare. “But they like you. Very much.”

“Nobody asked _you_ ,” said Lavellan.

The Nightmare so far had done nothing except talk. It had insulted Stroud, Hawke, and Dorian, not particularly skillfully. While the crack about his father had been offensive, Dorian couldn’t say that it had exactly flayed him open.

It didn’t seem to know what to do with Varric. On the other hand, it _definitely_ had Iron Bull’s measure.

“My children would particularly like to ride the Qunari. Or perhaps I shall possess him for myself. He would make a fine steed in the other world…”

Bull’s muttering acquired a certain hostile edge. Lavellan gripped the back of the Qunari’s elbow and said “Virgins. On dragons.”

“We may be past virgins, boss.”

“Okay, extremely experienced tavern wenches. Also on dragons.”

“...right, that should get me past the next batch of terrors.”

This was a good thing, because the next batch of terrors descended on them very quickly after that.

Everything died still, which was good.

“Is it just me,” asked Varric, yanking a bolt out of one of the spider-terrors, “or do they seem to be getting even more legs as we go deeper in? Like they’re turning into nightmarepedes or something like that, instead of just spiders.”

“Nightmarepedes,” said Dorian. “That’s a _lovely_ image.”

“Have you ever thought of becoming a writer?” asked Hawke.

“I hear there’s no money in it,” said Varric.

“Not like following the Inquisition around rescuing kittens,” said Lavellan.

“Yeah, t _hat’s_ hot and cold running cash, right there…”

When the terrors were dispatched, a green…something…remained standing in the center of what was, for lack of a better term, a cavern.

“Is that supposed to be you?” asked Varric.

“Ugh, I hope that’s not what I look like,” muttered Lavellan.

“Usually you’re much less see-through,” said Dorian.

The green, wraith-like Inquisitor stood in the middle of the room, an expression of rage on its ghostly face.

“The Divine did tell you to collect your memories,” said Stroud.

“Touching the horrible thing that looks like you in the middle of the Fade can’t possibly end badly,” said Dorian. “I’m sure it’ll be a lovely experience you’ll remember fondly for years to come.”

Lavellan gave him a wry look. “Well,” he said, pulling one of his gauntlets loose. “Here goes nothing…”

He plunged his bare hand into his ghostly self—and folded up immediately, like a puppet with its strings cut.

_"Mahonen!”_ Dorian leapt to catch him, staggered under the weight—the Inquisitor’s greatsword alone would have taxed the mage, never mind the rest of him—and Iron Bull got there in time to get them both shored up.

“It’s fine,” gasped Lavellan. “Fine. Just…wasn’t expecting that. Remind me to sit down next time.” He huffed a laugh. “Should have realized I’d have to re-live it so I could remember it again.

“What did you see?” asked Varric.

“The temple. A doorway, and a green light through it. And voices. The Divine shouting.” He shook his head. “Well. I didn’t expect they’d be good memories.”

“You should be grateful that I took them,” said the Nightmare. “What good did they do you?”

Lavellan rolled his eyes and stepped free of Bull and Dorian’s grasp. “Surely you can do better than that,” he called.

The Nightmare chuckled.

They continued to wade through the sloppy mist (misty slop? Squelching fog?) Rocks floated aimlessly past. Something that looked like a ghostly lamprey undulated past overhead, intent on some errand of its own.

And then there was the graveyard.

“Look,” said Varric, “I know I’m a dwarf and I’m not supposed to be here at all, but is this sort of thing normal for you people? Gravestones with all your friends’ fears written on them?”

“Oh yes. All the best houses in Tevinter are decorated with them,” said Dorian. He glanced at Blackwall’s deepest fear and snorted. _Typical._

“You don’t have one,” said Hawke, glancing at Lavellan.

“I believe our host has eaten my fears,” said the Dalish man. “At least, this set.”

“So you aren’t afraid?”

“Oh, I’m completely terrified,” said Lavellan cheerfully. “Mostly of failing the people who depend on me. But it doesn’t seem to be able to get in.”

“It might have devoured the bits that would allow it access to you,” said Dorian.

“Like a fire burning itself out?” said Stroud.

“Ah…well. More like…” He groped for an analogy. “Do you have snapping turtles in this part of the world?”

“Giant ones,” said Lavellan.

“Yes. Well, if one bites onto your finger to grab you, you’re caught. But if it bites your finger clear off, then you’re free again. It has to find another way to grab you, because it ate its grip.”

There was a brief silence.

“Don’t quit your day job,” said Varric. “That was a terrible metaphor.”

“I’m a mage. The only thing anyone expects me to write are treatises about the Fade.”

Bull tried to knock his stone over. It didn’t budge.

“You okay?” asked Lavellan quietly.

The Qunari nodded. “Oh yeah, this bit’s fine. I know perfectly well that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“So beautifully afraid,” added the Nightmare.

Bull ignored it and nudged Dorian. “Temptation, eh? And here I thought you ran after that at every opportunity.”

“Different kind of temptation,” said Dorian glumly.

“Temptations to fix things, mostly,” the Nightmare said pleasantly. “So many things you could fix, couldn’t you, Dorian? All it would take would be a little bit of magic here and there…just a nudge. Just a trifle.”

“Thank you so much for clarifying,” said Dorian.

“The Inquisitor, for example,” purred the demon. “Oh yes. You thought you’d lost him, didn’t you? You probably still have.”

Dorian began to stalk through the mist, away from the graves.  

“So good. So kind. So heartbreakingly earnest. Everything you didn’t know you wanted. So easy to love. For anyone, but you were the one he wanted. And then you set all that on fire, didn’t you? Almost worthy of a terror demon, the way you played on his fears. You knew just what to say. All the things he was afraid were true...” A deep, subterranean chuckle. “I should salute you as a colleague, Dorian.”

Lavellan touched his shoulder and Dorian shook it off. He knew what was coming, what had to be coming…

“But you can fix that, can’t you?” said the Nightmare. “All you need is a little bit of blood. Barely any. Perhaps a slave’s worth. And then he’d be yours forever.”

The Inquisitor inhaled sharply. Dorian gritted his teeth. He was glad that they hadn’t been touching. Lavellan would have yanked his hand away—how could he not?—and Dorian’s heart had been bruised enough in the last few weeks already.

“He’d never know,” the Nightmare said. “And even if he did find out, a little more blood would make sure that he didn’t care. You could fix it. And it’s not like you’d be doing anything…unethical. He was probably going to fall in love with you anyway. You’d just be putting things right. You’d be fixing a mistake you shouldn’t have made in the first place. Correcting an unfortunate error. Your father would understand…”

_“Enough!”_

The echoes of the mage’s shout rang from the floating rocks and the smothering mists. The Nightmare’s laughter surrounded him.

When all the echoes of man and demon had died away, Dorian finally turned around.

The others were clustered near the graveyard, carefully not looking in their direction. The Inquisitor stood alone, only a few feet away.

Looking at him.

The terrible Fadelight was on him and he looked sallow and angular and alien, the black side of his face a mask of shadow. His deepwater eyes were clear as glass.

"I'm sorry," said Dorian. "I wouldn't have done it. I'm sorry."

The Inquisitor nodded, not speaking.

“For Maker’s sake, say something,” said Dorian finally, when he couldn’t take it any longer.

“Heartbreakingly earnest,” said Lavellan. “I resent that.”

It wasn’t what he’d expected, but it drew a crack of laughter from him. “Well, you _are,_ you know.”

“Probably.” The elf raked his hand through his short red hair. Blood and sweat and whatever godawful stuff came out of terror-spiders had dried it into small stiff spikes. “Dorian, it’s all right. I know you wouldn’t.”

“No,” said Dorian. “I wouldn’t. But I shouldn’t even be tempted. The thought shouldn’t even have occurred to me.” He laughed again, humorlessly this time. “I didn’t even let myself _think_ it, you know. I could feel it down there, but as long as I never, ever let it out, I could pretend it didn’t count.”

Lavellan sighed. “I thought about killing Cassandra,” he said. “When she let me free of those chains. I thought about getting my hands on a sword and gutting her right there and running back to my clan.” He held up his Fade-marked hand, gazed at it thoughtfully. “I’d have had to cut my hand off, though. The mark was eating me alive. So I decided to kill her left-handed, so that I could take the hand off, and if anyone caught me, I could claim the mark had done it on its own.”

Dorian stared at him.

“I didn’t do it, obviously,” Lavellan said. “But I don’t feel any guilt for thinking it. It’s like Bull planning out how to kill everyone in a room, just in case it comes up. Everyone thinks things. You are the sum of the things you’ve _done_ , not the things you conceivably _might_ do.”

“You say things like that, and I believe you,” said Dorian sadly. “Mostly because you’re the one saying them. But then I forget.”

“Then I shall keep reminding you,” said Lavellan, slipping his arms around Dorian’s waist.

Dorian leaned his forehead against the elf’s. “Should we really be doing this now?”

“I’m fairly certain everyone knows already.”

“I meant in front of the Nightmare.”

“Let it see that it’s lost this one.”

“I have lost nothing,” growled the voice, but Dorian barely heard. Mahonen’s lips were warm on his, his scarred hand fitted against the curve of the mage’s cheek, and that was almost worth falling into the Fade for.

“Tell me it’s not too late,” said Dorian hoarsely, when they broke apart at last. “Lie if you have to.”

“It’s not too late,” said Lavellan. “The Nightmare was wrong.”

“I am not wrong…” groused the demon, a faint, whining note in its gravelly voice.

“I’d already fallen in love with you,” said the Inquisitor.

“See, there you are,” said Dorian, trying to hide that he felt as if he'd been kicked in the chest. “Being earnest again.”

“It’s a failing, I admit.”

“Mortals. Feh,” muttered the Nightmare, and rained terror-spiders on them, but Dorian didn’t mind.

           


End file.
